Influence of cognitive styles on technical drawing students’ achievements in senior secondary school in Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja.

Abstract

There are different cognitive strategies for processing information which in turn influence students’ academic achievement, This paper reports an investigation of cognitive styles and achievement scores of secondary school student’s .In the study, the standardized Group Embedded Figures Test was used to determine the influence of students cognitive styles on technical drawing students’ achievement in senior secondary schools in Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja. A research question and null hypothesis tested at 0.05 level of significance guided the study. The design of the study was a casual comparative or (expost-facto) design. The sample for the study consisted of 87 senior secondary schools Two (SSS11) Technical Drawing students drawn from the three sampled schools in three Area councils of FCT. The students were categorized into three groups based on Group Embedded Figure Test (GEFT) The instrument used for data collection was Technical Drawing Achievement Test (TDAT) The instruments were face and content validated by three Technical Drawing lecturers and two experts in Measurement and Evaluation . The reliability coefficient of Basis of Electricity Achievement Tests (BEAT) was established using kuder-Richardson formula 20(k-R20 and this yielded an index of 0.69. Data were analyzed with mean, standard deviation and analysis of variance (ANOVA). Result of the study revealed that cognitive style significantly influence students’ achievements in Technical Drawing. Recommendations made among others were that students’ cognitive styles be adopted for effective teaching of Technical Drawing in secondary school