Comparative effects of cognitive & traditional task analysis-based instructional guides on students’ skills achievement in electronics work

Abstract

This study was designed to determine the comparative effects of cognitive and traditional task analysis-based instructional guides on technical college students’ skills achievement in electronics work. The study adopted a quasi-experimental design. The population of the study was 174 Technical college III (TC III) students of all the technical colleges offering Electronics Work in North central, Nigeria. The entire population of 174 students was used for the study from which 90 TC III students comprising of 79 male and 11 female constituted treatment group assigned to cognitive task analysis-based instruction, and 84 TC III students comprising 65 male and 19 female constituted another treatment group assigned to traditional task analysis-based instruction. Two research questions and three null hypotheses, tested at 0.05 level of significance, guided the study. The instrument used for data collection was Electronics Work Troubleshooting Skills Achievement Test (EWTSAT). The instrument was subjected to face validation by three experts in vocational and technical education. The inter-rater reliability was employed to determine the reliability of the EWTSAT. The inter-rater reliability was calculated using Kendall’s Coefficient of Concordance and the size of the concordance was found to be 0.76. Mean was used to answer the research questions; while ANCOVA was employed to test the hypotheses. The study found out that cognitive task analysis-based instructional guide is more effective in improving students’ skill achievement in electronics work than traditional task analysis-based instructional guide. There was an effect of gender on students’ skill achievement in electronics work favouring boys. The study found out that there are no significant interaction effects of treatment and gender on technical college students’ skill achievement in electronics work. It was therefore, recommended among others that Electronics teachers should adopt the use of cognitive task analysis-based instructional guide in teaching electronics, and More encouragements should be provided to the female students to improve their performance in skills-related courses such as electronics.