Teachers’ motivational strategies for the enhancement of senior secondary school students’ interest in economics in Abia state

ABSTRACT

Economics is considered as an important subject but despite the laudable objectives and importance of teaching economics in the school, students’ performance in recent time has been on the decline. This study therefore investigated the teachers’ motivational strategies for the enhancement of senior secondary school students’ interest in Economics in Abia State. Seven research questions and seven null hypotheses guided the study. The study adopted a descriptive survey design. The sample of the study consisted of 122 Economics teachers (38 male and 84 female teachers).  The study adopted multi stage sampling techniques to determine the sample size. The instrument for data collection was a structured questionnaire titled “Teachers’ Motivational Strategies for the Enhancement of Senior Secondary School Students’ Interest in Economics” (MSESSSIE). The instrument was  face validated by three validates.. The Cronbach alpha reliability analysis was used to determine the internal consistency of the items that made up the instrument which yielded a reliability coefficient (r) of 0.82 which indicated that the instrument was reliable. The research questions were answered using mean and standard deviation while t-test statistic was used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. Results of the study showed that teachers’ motivational strategies such as proper teachers behavior, teacher recognition of students efforts,  promotion of learners’ self-confidence,  creation of pleasant classroom climate, increased learners goal-orientedness and the promotion of group cohesiveness to a high extent influence  students’ interest in Economics. Based on the findings, it was recommended that seminars, workshop should be organised for Economics teachers on the use of these motivational strategies in order  to enhance students interest in Economics so as to achieve high academic achievement in both internal and external examinations.