PREPARATION OF PRIMARY TEACHERS IN PUPIL-CENTRED ACTIVITY-BASED MATHEMATICS INSTRUCTIONS AND ITS MODEL

Abstract

The study is carried out as one of the various interventions to overhaul primary school teacher education programmes in Nigeria. This is considered necessary at this time because various research findings have revealed that majority of primary school teachers in Nigeria cannot deliver activitybased or any other pupil-centred mathematics lesson. For meaningful mathematics learning to take place at this level of education, the mathematics content must be directly related to real-life situation and the only instructional method that can help achieve this is activity-based. The study adopted pretest-posttest control group quasi-experimental research design involving two colleges of education randomly selected from south west part of Nigeria. Pre-service teachers in one of the colleges were exposed to activity-based instructions while those in the other were exposed to conventional method. The results revealed that those exposed to activity-based instructions have higher mean scores in activity-based lesson planning and delivery skills and in subject matter knowledge too. Based on this intervention, an instructional model for primary school teacher preparation was proposed