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Choice of Teaching Subjects inPre‐service Teacher Education inNigeriaC. S. Akpe aa Rivers State College of Education , P.M.B. 5047, PortHarcourt, NigeriaPublished online: 03 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: C. S. Akpe (1991) Choice of Teaching Subjects in Pre‐service TeacherEducation in Nigeria, Journal of Education for Teaching: International research and pedagogy,17:2, 213-219

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Journal of Education for Teaching, Vol. 17, No. 2, 1991 213

Choice of Teaching Subjects in Pre-service Teacher Education in NigeriaC. S. AKPERivers State College of Education, P.M.B. 5047, Port Harcourt, Nigeria

ABSTRACT Factors influencing students' choice of teaching subjects in a Nigerian pre-serviceprimary teacher education programme were investigated. A marked imbalance in the pattern ofchoice of teaching subjects in favour of the humanities was found. Students' choice of teachingsubjects in the third year of the programme seems to be influenced by their level of performance inthe chosen subjects during their first 2 years in the programme, job and further educationopportunities offered by those subjects. The implications of these findings are examined in the paper.

INTRODUCTION

The Federal Government of Nigeria has adopted education as an instrument parexcellence for effecting national development. This underlies the phenomenal expan-sion of educational provision at all levels and the vigorous experimentation in allaspects of education within the last two decades. Nigerians themselves took theirfirst conscious step at revolutionising education when as a result of the deliberationsof the National Curriculum Conference of 1969, a National Policy on Educationwas fashioned. The National Policy on Education is as much a policy statement as itis a curriculum document. It sets out the goals and aims of the Nigerian Society,from which issue the goals of education and subsequently the objectives of eachlevel of schooling.

In order to make the educational system relevant and functional, the 6 years ofprimary education, 3 years of Junior Secondary School, 3 years of Senior SecondarySchool and 4 years of University education educational structure was prescribed andhas been implemented in all the states of the Federation. In the new educationstructure the secondary school cycle is split into junior and senior secondary schoolphases. The junior and senior secondary school curricula are supposed to put equalemphasis on both academic and pre-vocational subjects to achieve this objective.

But it is pertinent to point out that no matter how good a curriculum might be,if there are no competent teachers to execute it in the schools, the desirededucational outcomes cannot be realised. Fafunwa (1967) underscored this pointwhen he noted:

the demand for more and better schools in all parts of the continent(Nigeria inclusive); the need to relate the curriculum to the child'senvironment; the need for appropriate textbooks and other instructional

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214 C.S. Akpe

materials; the desirability of training in vocational and technical skills andindeed the overall problem of preparing the future citizens of Africa whowill be fully oriented to their environment cannot be effectively accom-plished without the aid of competent teachers.

The National Policy on Education also put in perspective the crucial role ofTeacher Education in the successful implementation of the country's educationalprogramme.

Teacher education will continue to be given a major emphasis in all oureducational planning because no educational system can rise above thequalities of its teachers.

A striking feature of the New Education Policy is its emphasis on science andtechnology. As a result, the teaching of science and pre-vocational subjects occupiesa central position at all levels of the school system. This in turn has importantimplications for every teacher education programme in the country. However, it hasbeen rightly observed Udoh (1984) that this emphasis has not been reflected in thesubject offerings by students in the Nigeria Certificate in Education (NCE)Programmes. There is a marked imbalance in favour of the liberal arts to thedetriment of the science and pre-vocational subjects.

Ezewu (1981) has also observed that many student teachers in Nigeria havepoor attitudes and motivation towards mathematics and science subjects during theirtraining. This has therefore constituted a problem to the teaching of these subjectsin the primary schools. This appears to be a major deficiency of primary teachereducation curriculum in this country.

To take care of this deficiency, the NCE primary programme at Rivers StateCollege of Education offers a generalist curriculum intended to equip a primaryteacher to teach and supervise instruction in all subject areas offered at the primarylevel. To achieve this objective, students are trained to acquire some basic knowl-edge in all primary school subjects in the first 2 years of the programme. However,they elect two teaching subjects in the third year. This 'quasi specialisation' isintended to prepare the students as subject specialists at primary level and alsoprovide a foundation for their future personal development. The programmerecruits students with secondary school and grade two teacher training backgrounds.

It has been observed that, like the NCE secondary programmes, the majority ofthe NCE primary students opt for arts combination (language arts/social studies)while only a few of them choose to do integrated science and mathematics in thethird year of the programme. To lay a solid foundation for a scientific andtechnological education demanded by the 6-3-3-4 education structure, we requireprimary school teachers who must be competent in mathematics, basic science andtechnology to lay the foundation at the primary level. It is against this backgroundthat this investigation was carried out to identify the possible factors whichinfluence the students' choice of teaching subjects in the final year of the NCEprimary programme. It is hoped that the result of the investigation might help tothrow light on the students' problems in the choice of teaching subjects and provide

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Pre-service Teacher Education in Nigeria 215

an empirical basis for guiding and counselling students in the choice of theirteaching subjects in teacher training institutions. The study will also provide a clueto the solution of the problem of imbalance in the choice of teaching subjects bystudents in teacher education programmes in Nigeria.

THE STUDY

All 119 final year students registered in the primary teacher education programmeof Rivers State College of Education in the 1988/89 academic year participated inthe study. They comprised 74 females and 45 males. Thirty-eight (31.9%) of themattended Teachers' Grade II College only, 32 (26.9%) had both teacher training andsecondary education background while 49 (41.21%) were drawn from secondaryeducation background only. Forty-seven representing (39.5%) of the studentsoffered integrated science and mathematics in their final year in the 1988/89academic year while 72 (60.5%) offered social studies and language arts.

INSTRUMENTATION

The major instrument utilised in this investigation consisted of students' biodatacontaining their educational background, choice of subject combination and reasonsfor such choices.

During an education lecture on measurement and evaluation in the secondsemester of 1988/89 session, the course lecturer asked the students to write a onepage biodata on themselves stating their educational background prior to admissioninto the NCE programme, their subject combination and reasons for their choice forsuch subject combination. This was given as an assignment to the students and wascollected through their course leaders.

DATA ANALYSIS

The contents of the students' personal biodata were scrutinised and analysed. Thevarious reasons put forward by the students for their choice of subjects were groupedand the frequencies and percentages with which they were given were computed.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

TABLE I. Choice of teaching subjects according to sex

Subject combination Male Female

Mathematics/ 15 (12.6%) 32 (26.9%)Integrated Science

Social studies/language arts 30 (25.2%) 42 (35.3%)

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216 C.S. Akpe

Tables I and II show the relative proportions of male and female students andrelative proportions of students drawn from different educational backgroundsoffering science/arts subject combinations respectively. The results on the tablesshow that the proportion of female students offering maths and integrated sciencecombination is about double that of their male counterparts, while a slightly higherpercentage of the students with teacher training background only offered the samecombination as those who attended both secondary and teacher training colleges orthe secondary school only. Both observations go contrary to expected trends as thereare usually more men in science and mathematics than women and more studentsfrom secondary schools with better science and mathematics backgrounds, whowould be better disposed to choose these as their teaching subjects than theircounterparts with teacher training background only. A plausible explanation of thistrend is that with the increasing number of tertiary institutions in Rivers State, theCollege of Education is unlikely to attract high quality of secondary school productsin science and mathematics. In a wider context this could be related to the inabilityof the education service to attract the best students into the profession because of itspoor reward system as compared to other professions.

TABLE II. Choice of teaching subjects according to educational background

Subjectcombination

Mathematics/integrated science

Social studies/language arts

TTCbackground

17 (14.3%)

21 (17.6%)

TTC/Secondaryschool

background

15 (12.6%)

17 (14.3%)

Secondary schoolbackground

15 (12.6%)

34 (28.6%)

Tables III and IV show the reasons given by students in the science/mathema-tics and language arts/social studies combinations in descending order of occurrencefor their choice of teaching subjects in the final year of the NCE Programme. Theresults clearly indicate that the students' choice of subject combination is deter-mined mainly by their superior performance in their subjects of preference.

The students' superior performance in some subjects relative to others couldalso be logically related to the facility with which they learn the subjects theychoose. It can, therefore, be deducted that more student teachers in the programmestudy language arts and social studies more comfortably than they study mathema-tics and integrated science. One obvious inference that can be drawn from thisanalysis is that students can be attracted to offer maths/integrated science if theycan be helped to improve their performance in these subjects in their early years inthe programme through identifying their learning difficulties and assisting them tofind solutions to them. This calls for improved methods of teaching and individual-ised attention to be given to students when they are in the first and second years of

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Pre-service Teacher Education in Nigeria 217

TABLE III. Reasons offered by students for their choice ofmaths/integrated science combination

1.

2.

3.

4.

Reasons

Good performance inscience subjectcombination

Need for and recognitionof science teachers

Provision of betterjob opportunity

Practical utilityto problem solving

Frequency

42

15

10

7

%

35.3

12.6

8.4

5.9

the programme. This analysis has some bearing on the third reason given by thestudents in language arts and social studies combination that they chose theircombination because of deficiency in mathematics and integrated science.Language arts/social studies students also reason that they can more easily pursue aB.Ed, degree programme in language arts or social studies than they can do inmathematics or integrated science. Some of them opined that the level at whichthese subjects are studied in the NCE Programme does not provide enoughfoundation for advanced work in them at University level. This observations callsfor a critical review of the content of the curriculum of the NCE programme toensure relevance and depth to provide necessary foundation for university work.

TABLE IV. Reasons given by students offering arts combination

Reasons Frequency %

1. Good performance in artssubject combination 32 26.9

2. Provides opportunity forfurther academic growth 20 16.8

3. Weakness in scienceand mathematics 15 12.6

4 Relevance to futurecareer 10 8.4

The result of this investigation also shows that a few of the students in theprogramme have interests outside the teaching profession. Some of them indicatedinterest in profession like law and business administration and therefore elect tostudy language and social studies which are the subjects on the NCE Curriculumnearest to their areas of interest. However small proportions of students (12.6%)opt for science and mathematics combination because of the prestige and benefitscience/mathematics teachers enjoy relative to their counterparts who teach other

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218 C.S. Akpe

subjects and the better job opportunities offered by science and mathematics. Thesereasons are in keeping with the labour market situation in Nigeria today wherethousands of trained professional teachers roam the street in search of teachingpositions. Nigerian Government has also, in its bid to encourage the study of scienceand mathematics in schools, offered generous allowances to science and mathematicsteachers, an attitude which can be interpreted as indicative of better recognition ofscience teachers by Nigerian society. Today mathematics and science teachers aremore readily placed in the teaching service than their arts counterparts. However,such economic considerations seemed to have played a less prominent role inshaping students' choice of teaching subjects than their interest and performance inthe subjects chosen.

It is however disappointing to observe that none of the students gave interest inteaching a particular subject area as the reason for the choice of a subjectcombination. It would have been expected that in a professional programme of thistype students could have developed special interest in teaching specific subjectswhich would then act as a motivating factor of the students' choice of teachingsubject. The failure to develop such professional interest might be traced to themechanical way in which teacher education programmes are operated these days andthe materialistic value orientation of Nigerian society which stifles the developmentof interests in intrinsic values.

FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The following might be listed as the major finding of this investigation. There is amarked imbalance in the pattern of choice of teaching subjects in favour of artssubjects in the NCE Primary Programme. A higher proportion of students withprevious teacher training background chose science and mathematics combinationthan their counterparts with secondary school background. This is probably relatedto the quality of secondary school leavers recruited into the programme.

Students' choice of teaching subject areas is determined mainly by their level ofperformance in the programme during the first 2 years. Other motivating factorsinclude opportunities provided for further education and securing placement in thelabour market.

However some students are driven away from offering science and mathematicscombination because of their perceived deficiency in these subject areas while othersare attracted to the arts because for them teaching is a stepping stone to a moreenduring ambition.

The results of this investigation point to the need to provide students necessaryassistance in their early years in the programme particularly in science andmathematics. This will help them to improve on their performances before theycome to the third year when they choose their teaching subjects. The NCE primaryprogramme offers a unique opportunity which the secondary teacher educationprogramme does not in that the primary students do not make up their minds onchoice of subjects before admission into the programme. If the students aretherefore adequately taught and assisted to improve on their performance, in science

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Pre-service Teacher Education in Nigeria 219

and mathematics, more of them can be attracted to offer these subjects in their finalyear.

Students who come into the programme with preconceived notion of deficiencyin certain subject areas need to be identified early enough to be assisted andcounselled. Such students can be advised to take advantage of the college remedialprogramme to remedy such deficiencies.

The conventional teaching approach may need to be supplemented withenhanced teaching strategies like mastery learning and individualised instruction toassist those who came into the programme with deficiencies in some subject areas.

The result of the study uncovers the fear which some students have about theprogramme. They perceive the programme as terminal because the level at whichmathematics and science are taught in the NCE primary programme does notprovide good enough foundation for university work. This fear whether real orimaginary calls for the need for an immediate review of the programme curriculumby the programme operators.

REFERENCES

EZEWU, E. (1981) Some comments on the Curriculum for training teachers for the Primary SchoolSystem in Bendel State, Nigeria, Journal of Education for Teaching, 7(2), pp. 165-175.

FAFUNWA, A.B. (1967) New Perspectives in African Education, pp. 82-92 (Lagos, Macmillan).NEW NATIONAL POLICY ON EDUCATION (1981) (Lagos, Federal Government Press).UDOH, S.U. (1984) An Examination of the Nigerian Certificate in Education, Nigerian Journal of

Curriculum Studies, 2(1), pp. 48-57.

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