LECTURERS’ PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICES IN EARLY CHILDHOOD CARE AND EDUCATION PROGRAMMES, AND PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ STIMULATION SKILLS IN SOUTHWEST, NIGERIA

Abstract

Stimulation Skills (SSs) are those practices used by teachers in engaging children to learn. Reports have shown that many preschool teachers are deficient in SSs in the South-west, Nigeria. Past studies were mainly interventions to improve SSs, with little focus on the lecturers’ pedagogical practices in the Colleges of Education (CoEs). Therefore, this study was designed to determine the pedagogical practices (preparation for lectures; sourcing and use of instructional resources; lecture development and delivery; and development and use of assessment tools) of Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) lecturers as correlates of pre-service teachers’ SSs in the CoEs in the South-west, Nigeria. The study was hinged on Lev Vygotsky’s Social Constructivist and Ivan Pavlov’s Behaviourist theories, while the mixed methods (QUAN + qual) type of triangulation design was adopted. The multi-stage sampling procedure was used. Five of the six state CoEs that had ECCE up to 300 level were purposively selected. The simple random sampling technique was used to select one CoE from each states. The 21 lecturers and 116 pre-service teachers in the Department of ECCE in the selected CoE were enumerated. The Instruments used were ECCE Pre-service Teachers’ Observation Schedule (r=0.72), ECCE Lecturers’ Course Material and Assessment Tools Scale (r=0.80) and ECCE Lecturers’ Instructional Resources Observation Checklist (r=0.71). In-depth interviews were conducted with five ECCE lecturers and five pre-service teachers. The quantitative data were analysed using descriptive statistics and Pearson product moment correlation at 0.05 level of significance, while the qualitative data were thematically analysed. Lecturers’ educational attainment were Ph.D. (28.6%), M.Phil. (4.8%), M.Ed. (57.2%) and others (9.6%), while (80.2%) of the pre-service teachers were female. The quality of the lecture materials prepared by the lecturers ( = 2.04); the extent to which lecturers use instructional resources ( = 1.23); the extent to which lecturers adopted student-centred strategies ( = 1.60) and the quality of pre-service teachers’ lesson plan ( = 1.67) were low against the threshold of 2.50. The assessment tools utilisation by the lecturers showed that cognitive-based ( = 1.50) and physical-based ( = 1.50) were fairly used against the threshold of 2.50. There was a significant positive relationship between lecturers’ lecture planning skills (r= 0.50) and pre-service teachers’ stimulation skills. Lecturers’ sourcing and use of instructional resources, utilisation of student-centred strategies as well as development and use of assessment tools had no significant relationships with pre-service teachers’ SSs. The pre-service teachers were not exposed to the delivery of child-centred instructional methods for children. The lecturers hardly used instructional resources to deliver their lectures. Lecture planning skills of lecturers influenced the stimulation skills of pre-service teachers in colleges of education in the South-west, Nigeria. Pre-service teachers in early childhood care and education department should be exposed to these strategies