Abstract

This study examined the effects of project and inquiry instructional strategies on secondary school students’ achievement in Social Studies. The study adopted the pre-test, post-test, control group quasi-experimental design. The population for the study comprised all Junior Secondary School Students in Ekiti State and the sample consisted of 270 Junior Secondary School Class II students selected from nine schools in Ekiti State. Simple random sampling was used to select six single-sex schools (3 boys only and 3 girls only) and purposive sampling was used to select three co-educational schools for the study. Stratified random sampling was also used to select 30 students (15 males and 15 females) from each co-educational school and simple random sampling was used to select 30 students from each single-sex school. The instrument used for the study was the Social Studies Achievement Test (SSAT) designed and validated by the researcher and experts in Social Studies. The instrument was made up of 40 multiple-choice items designed to measure the students’ achievement in Social Studies. The test, re-test and estimation of internal consistency methods of reliability were adopted and the reliability co-efficient of 0.77 and 0.74 was obtained respectively. Five hypotheses were tested at 0.05level of significance. The data were analysed using t-test and ANCOVA statistical tools. The results showed that there was a significant difference between the achievement of students in the experimental and control groups. There was a significant difference between the pretest mean scores and achievement mean scores of students in the experimental and control groups. There was a significant difference between the achievement mean scores of male students in the experimental and control groups. There was a significant difference between the achievement mean scores of female students in the experimental and control groups and there is no significant difference between the achievement mean scores of male and female students in each of the experimental and control groups. It was found in the study that inquiry strategy was the most effective and project strategy wasmore effective than traditional expository lecture method in improving students’ achievement in Social Studies. It was therefore recommended, that teachers should make their lessons more interesting, appealing, practical, lively and friendly to enhance students’ achievement in Social Studies. Teachers should make use of inquiry and project strategies that encourage development of life-skills in learners.