Abstract:
This study was designed to investigate the influence of gender, school location and students attitude on academic achievement in Basic Technology in Delta State. The study adopted an Ex- post facto design (Causal-comparative). Three research questions were posed and seven null hypotheses tested at .05 level of significance guided the study. The population of the study comprised 56,800 JSS111 Basic Technology students in 826 secondary schools in Delta State. The sample size was 1,844 JSS111 students randomly sampled from 56,800 JSSIII students from the 826 State owned secondary schools in Delta State. The instruments used were Basic Technology Achievement Test (BTAT) and Students Attitude Questionnaire (SAQ). Both instruments were validated by experts and the reliability co-efficient of BTAT was calculated to be .76 using Kuder-Richardson Formula 20 (KR-20); while the reliability co-efficient of the SAQ was found to be .61 using Cronbach Alpha procedure. The data collected were analyzed using Mean, Standard Deviation, t-test and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The t-test was used to test the significant influence of the independent variables for hypotheses one to three; while the ANOVA was used to test null hypotheses four to seven at .05 level of significance. The major findings were that gender influences academic Achievement in BT since male students performed better than female students, School location influences academic achievement in BT since urban students performed better than rural students, Students’ attitude influences academic achievement in BT since students with positive attitude performed better than the students with negative attitudes in the BTAT. Also, there was significant influence of gender (male and female) on the academic achievement of students, there was significant influence of school location (urban and rural) on the academic achievement of students and there was significant influence of students’ attitude (positive and negative) on the academic achievement of students in BT all tested at .05 level of significance. In addition, there was no significant interactive influence of gender and school location on students’ academic achievement in BT, there was no significant interactive influence of gender and students’ attitudes on students’ academic achievement in BT, there was no significant interactive influence of school location and students’ attitude on academic achievement in BT and there was no significant interactive influence of gender, school location and students’ attitude on academic achievement in BT at .05 level of significant. It was recommended among others that, qualified teachers of Basic Technology should be employed by government of Delta State and relevant facilities for effective teaching and learning of the subject should be provided in secondary schools. Finally, suggestions for further research were made such as the need to carry out studies on these independent variables in other States and School subjects in Junior Secondary Schools so as to justify further the findings of this study. In addition, a similar study should be carried out using samples from private schools and public schools with population involving mixed secondary schools and their results compared.
