ABSTRACT

Owing to the apparent unsatisfactory performance of students in Economics accompanied with poor interest students show for Economics as a subject irrespective of so many teaching strategies used by teachers, this study however seeks to find a pedagogically sound teaching strategy that can promote students interest and academic achievement in Economics. This study is on the effect of integrated mastery learning strategy on students’ interest and academic achievement in Economics in Imo State. The study used a quasi-experimental design of a pretest and posttest non-equivalent control group design. Five research questions were raised, five objectives of the study were posed and five hypotheses were formulated for the study. Data were collected using students’ Economics interest inventory (SEII) and Economics Achievement Test (EAT). The instruments for data collection were face and content validated by three experts. A reliability coefficient of 0.83 and 0.69 were obtained for SEII and EAT respectively. The data collected were analysed using mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions while ANCOVA was used for testing the five hypotheses formulated. The results gathered indicated that integrated mastery learning strategy had significant effect on students’ academic achievement in Economics as student taught with the innovative approach had higher mean gain than their counterparts in the conventional group. The result further showed that there was no significant difference in the mean achievement scores of male and female students taught Economics using integrated mastery learning. The researcher recommended that classroom Economics teachers should make it a point of duty in using integrated mastery learning strategy; government should be organizing workshops, seminars or in-service – trainings for teachers on how best to use integrated mastery learning strategy, teaching time should be increased by the relevant education authorities in order to enable the teacher adequately employ the integrated master learning strategy which is time dependent. Finally, curriculum experts should lay much emphasis on quality of content covered instead of quantity and should advice the teachers to always ensure mastery of contents by all students before the next unit of lesson is introduced.