Effects of Cooperative and Questioning Instructional Strategies on Academic Performance of Upper Basic Social Studies Students in Delta State

This study investigated the effects of cooperative and questioning strategies on academic performance of Upper Basic Social studies students in Delta State. Six hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. A quasi-experimental, equivalent pre-test, post-test, control group design using a 3x2x3 factorial design was adopted for the study. The population of this study comprises a total 77,295 Upper Basic 8 students in all the 471 public secondary schools in Delta State during the 2017/2018 session The sample of the study was 204 Upper Basic 8 students randomly selected from three different schools. The selected schools were randomly assigned to three treatment group. Treatments were given to the three groups for four weeks. A Social Studies Achievement Test (SSAT) with reliability coefficient of 0.77 was used to measure students’ performance before and after treatments. Data was analysed using T-test and Analysis of variance (ANOVA). The findings showed that: There is a significant difference in the academic performance of social studies students taught with cooperative instructional strategy and those taught with conventional lecturing method; There is a significant difference in the academic performance of social studies students taught with questioning instructional strategy and those taught with conventional lecturing method; There is no significant difference in the academic performance of social studies students taught with cooperative instructional strategy and those taught with questioning instructional strategy; There is a significant difference in the mean performance scores among the three group of students taught using cooperative, questioning and conventional lecturing instructional strategies;, There is no significant difference in the performance of male and female students taught using cooperative instructional strategy, questioning instructional strategy and conventional lecturing instructional strategy in Social Studies; and there is no significant interaction effect of instructional strategies and students scoring ability on students’ academic performance in Social Studies. Based on these findings, it was recommended among others, that Social Studies teachers should endeavour to expose students to cooperative and questioning instructional strategies so as to promotes and encourages social interaction, active engagement in learning, self-motivation, learning by doing and learning by experience in the classroom.