Effects of Interaction Pattern on Students’ Interest in Keyboarding in Colleges of Education in South-West, Nigeria

This study examined the effects of non-verbal interaction pattern on students’ interest in keyboarding in Colleges of Education in Southwest, Nigeria. It adopted quasi-experimental research design of pre-test, post-test non-equivalent control group design. The population for the study was 109 year one students of Office Technology and Management in state owned Colleges of Education in Southwest, Nigeria. Multistage sampling procedure was used to select 35 NCE I students in two of the Colleges offering OTM in Southwest, Nigeria, this comprised of 26 females and 9 males. One research questions and three null hypotheses tested at 0.05 level of significance guided the study. The instrument used for data collection was the Keyboarding Interest Inventory (KII). The KII was developed by the researcher and was subjected to face and content validity by three OTM experts. Cronbach Alpha was used to determine the internal consistency of the KII items. The reliability coefficient computed for the KII was 0.89. Mean was used to answer the research questions, while t-test was employed to test the hypotheses. It was observed that non-verbal interaction technique was more effective in stimulating students’ interest than the conventional method in keyboarding. There was also no significant difference between the interests of students in the experimental (non-verbal) groups based on gender. It was thereafter recommended that NCCE should incorporate non-verbal interaction pattern into the teaching of keyboarding. Lecturers of keyboarding should prepare their classes in such a way that students are allowed ample opportunity to critically think, interact freely with one another, discourage students’ passiveness and improve performance in pair and group activities among other recommendations.