Awareness of online chemistry instructional resources by senior school teachers in Kwara central, Nigeria

Abstract

Many research studies in chemistry education have been geared towards improving the mode of chemistry instruction delivery. Some of these efforts have resulted in the development of online resources for chemistry instruction. This study was conducted to find out the extent to which chemistry teachers in the study area were aware of the existence of these online resources. The survey research involved 234 chemistry teachers captured by the census sampling method. A research instrument, the Online Chemistry Instructional Resources Questionnaire (OCIRQ), was used to collect data from the teachers. The instrument was duly validated, and the reliability index was found to be 0.71. The data obtained were analyzed using frequency counts, mean, percentage, and Chi-square at 0.05 significance level. Findings revealed that Chemistry teachers were fully aware of only one of the forty-six online instructional resources, fairly aware of 27, and not aware of 18 of them. So also, there was no significant difference in the level of awareness of the online chemistry instructional resources between male and female chemistry teachers (X² (234) =4.341, p>0.05), between highly experienced, moderately experienced, and less experienced chemistry teachers (X² (234) =1.196, p>0.05), and between qualified and unqualified chemistry teachers (X²
(234) =4.194, p>0.05). Therefore, it is recommended that awareness of the existence of online chemistry instructional resources be created by school proprietors, educational professional bodies, and designers of such resources so that the teachers can make use of them in the classroom