THE EFFECT OF PERIODIC TEST ON STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT IN BUSINESS STUDIES

CHAPTER ONE

1.0 INTRODUCTION

1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

The Consistent of business failure of most secondary school leaves in May/June examinations conducted by Junior WAEC prompted the Federal Government to set up the panel to investigate the failure of students in the 2007 Junior Secondary Certificate examination (JSCE) of all the candidates who sat for the 2007 May/June JSCE, 84% failed (information on Nigeria Education, 2007). The impact of this on the candidates’ failure and the nation’s manpower development should be a cause for concern for the country’s leaders, stake holders in the education industry and the nation as a whole. However, dierent researchers have identified dierent factors adduced as being responsible for the consistent poor performance of students in Business Study. These include among others lack of proper digestion and utilization of research findings by Business Study teachers, Sex Stereotyping, transfer of poor attitudes of order students to the younger ones and poor self-concept towards Business study. The instructional/classroom characteristics, societal factors and school factors (Nwoji, 1999), teacher’s characteristics (Onocha and Okpala, 1985), anxiety, motivation, reasoning ability, problem solving skills and instructional strategy (Udousoro, 2000). From the foregoing, certain key factors emerge which seen to contribute more to the problem of poor achievement in Business study.

1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

The essence of using test and other evaluation instruments during the instructional process is to guide, direct and monitor student’s learning And progress towards attainment of course objectives (Alonge 2004, Kolawole 2010). The Utilization of periodic testing in the teaching, learning process involve breaking up the subject matter content or course into smaller hierarchical units for instruction, specifying objectives for each units, designing and administration of validated periodic test, offering a group remediation in area where students are deficient before moving to another units and then administration of summative test on completion of all units.

The breaking up of subject or course into small units make for adequate preparation for the test by the students. Moreover, such frequents testing enables the students to get more involved and committed to the teaching and learning process thereby enhancing performance . The periodic evaluation is useful to both the students (as a way of diagnosing students’ learning diiculties and the presentation of alternative remedial measure) and to the teacher (as means of locating the specific difficulties’ that the student are experiencing writhing subject matter content and forecasts summative evaluation result). According to Gronland and Linn (1990), periodic evaluation serves three specific uses namely; i. To plan corrective action for over coming learning deficiencies ii. To aid in motivating learners. iii. To increase retention and transfer of learning. According to them, students response to a periodic test could be analyses to reveal group and individual errors needing correction. Hence, periodic testing is a strategy designed to identify learners; learning difficulties with a view to providing remediation measure to enhance the performance of majority of students. The operations of the school are legally defined and structured around inflexible units of time as a result of the examination system that operated. This corroborated the position and opened that the busy routine of teacher in the discharge of their deities does not permit the luxury of the ideal ones to one observation of the students.