Abstract:
The research work was conducted to compare the extent of utilization of agricultural science instructional resources in Public and private secondary schools in Ankpa Education Zone of Kogi State. Five research questions and four hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance to guide the study. The study adopted survey research design. Checklist and structured questionnaire were employed as instruments for data collection. The data collected were analyzed using frequency, percentages, mean and standard deviation for answering research questions while t-test was used to test the null hypotheses of no significant difference at 0.05 level of significance. The population for the study was 215, made up of 168 teachers of agricultural science in public secondary schools and 47 teachers of agricultural science in private secondary schools. No sampling was done because of the manageable size of the population. Findings of the study revealed that most of the required instructional resources for the teaching and learning of Agricultural Science, especially in animal production were not available in both public and private secondary schools. Some simple farm tools, consumable resources and printed materials were to some extent fairly utilized other materials were underutilized. Findings of the study on constraint to availability and utilization of instructional resources such inadequate fund, inadequate skill for improvisation, inadequate power supply and the use of other subject masters to teach Agricultural science e.t.c. were identified. It was therefore, recommended that teachers should improvise, government through the ministry of Education should make fund available to purchase and improvise the required instructional resources, seminars and workshop should be organized for teachers to improve their skills and school should organize field trip to places of agricultural interest.
