Perception of Technical Education Students’ of their Challenges during Teaching Practice in Rivers State

Abstract

The study aimed at finding out the perception of technical education students on their challenges during teaching practice programme in Rivers State. Descriptive survey design was adopted for the study. Three research questions and three hypotheses guided the study. A 26-items questionnaire structured in a 4-point rating scale was used to collect data for the study. The instrument was face and content validated by five experts and the reliability coefficient of 0.80 was obtained through Cronbach’s Alpha Coefficient method. The population of the study consisted of 324 male and female final year technical education students in all the tertiary institutions in Rivers State that offer programmes in technical education. Simple and purposive sampling techniques were used to select 140 final year students who participated in the study Data were analyzed using mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions, while z-test statistics was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. It was found that attitude of teaching staff, lack of co-operation between communities and student-teachers, and inadequate security arrangement for student-teachers are major challenges that they usually encounter during their period of teaching practice. It was recommended among others, that heads of schools should ensure that adequate is been put in place to encourage teaching staff co-operation with student-teachers, community heads should ensure that their community will assist to take care of student-teachers’ in terms of accommodation and food items when they are posted to schools in their community, adequate measure should be put in place in order to protect lives and properties of student-teachers’ by heads of schools and community leaders