PREDICTIVE ESTIMATE OF OPENNESS TO EXPERIENCE AND SELF-EFFICACY ON EARLY YEARS TEACHERS’ PERCEPTION OF HANDS-ON MATERIALS FOR CLASSROOM TEACHING IN LAGOS, NIGERIA

<doi>10.24250/jpe/2/2023/OSS/LIE/</doi>

Abstract

The study was carried out to examine the predictive estimate
of openness to experience and self-efficacy on early years
teachers’ perception of hands-on materials for classroom
teaching in Lagos, Nigeria. The participants in the research
were all the public and private elementary schools teachers
in Lagos however snowball non-probability the sampling
method was adopted to select 150 elementary school
teachers as the sample. Three instruments titled Hands-on
Materials Utilization Questionnaire (HOMUQ), Openness to
Experience Questionnaire (OEQ) and Teacher Self-Efficacy
Rating Scales (TSERS) were used to gather the needed data.
Six research questions were raised while three null
hypotheses were formulated. While the inferential statistics
of Pearson Product Moment Correlation Statistic (PPMC)
and T-test were employed to test the null hypotheses at a
0.05 level of significance, the descriptive statistics of
frequency count, percentage, mean, and mean rank were
utilized to answer the research questions. The findings of
this investigation demonstrated that early year teachers
believed that using hands-on materials was beneficial for
teaching young schoolchildren in attendance; however, there
is no correlation between early year teachers' perceptions of
using hands-on materials in the classroom and their
openness to new experiences (r-value = -.003, p-value =
0.484 > 0.05); there is no significant relationship between
self-efficacy and early year’s teachers’ interpretation of how
hands on materials in the lecture hall (r-value = -.016, p-value = 0.844 > 0.05); there is no significance difference in
male and female early year teacher’s interpretation of how
hands-on materials for classroom teaching (t-value = 1.873,
p-value = 0.709 > 0.05). Considering the results, the
following recommendations among others were made:
Government and private school owners should provide
adequate and effective hands-on material(s) and make it
accessible to the early year’s teachers; Government and
private school owners through the ministry of education
should organize on regular basis seminar and or workshop
to be training the earlier years teachers on how to use
hands-on teaching material to deliver instruction in early
years classroom.