TRANSFORMING SCIENCE TEACHING AMONG PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS THROUGH SOCIAL SOFTWARES: IMPLICATIONS FOR 'LOVING LEARNING

The study investigated the extent of use of social software among pre-service science teachers in the federal universities in the South-east geopolitical zone of Nigeria. The population consists of all final year pre-service science teachers in the federal universities in the south-east geopolitical zone of Nigeria. Accidental random sampling technique was used to sample 592 final year science education student otherwise known as pre-service science teachers. The sample consists of 279 males and 314 females. The instrument for the study named Application of Social Software Questionnaire (ASSQ) consists of a 30-item questionnaire developed from the ten major classes of social software based on Mejias, 2005, classification. The instrument was validated by three experts in educational technology, measurement and evaluation and vocational teacher education. Crombach Alpha was used to determine the reliability of the instrument which was 0.82. Two research questions and one null hypothesis guided the study. Mean and Standard Deviation were used to answer the research questions while t-test statistics was used to analyze the null hypothesis. The findings of the study showed that the pre-service science teachers make use of all the social software investigated. However, they do not use any of them to a very high extent. They use a few of them to a high extent and majority to a low extent. Based on the findings, some recommendations were made which include that different universities in Nigeria should be encouraged to adopt different aspects of e-learning where social software will be integrated into science teaching and learning, knowing that students are interested in them