Teachers’ competence, motivation as correlates of senior secondary school students’ academic achievement in economics in Imo State

Abstract

The study examined teachers’ competence, motivation as correlates of senior secondary
school students’ academic achievement in economics in Imo State. The study adopted a
linear correlation design. The population of the study was 94,963 Senior Secondary
School Students (SS1-SS3) from 275 public secondary schools in Imo State. A sample
of 500 SS2 Economics students was involved in the study. Purposive and random
sampling techniques were used. The research instruments for this study are the
Teachers’ Competence Scale (TCS), Teachers’ Motivation Scale (TMS), and Economics
Achievement Test (EAT). The reliabilities of scales were established using Cronbach
alpha, while that of the achievement test was done with Kuder-Richardson (K-R20)
statistics, with internal consistency indices of 0.83, 0.86, and 0.78 for TCS, TMS, and
EAT, respectively. The data were analyzed using the Pearson “r” statistic for research
questions 1 and 2, while multiple linear regression statistics were used for research
question 3. Hypotheses 1 and 2 were tested using t-test significance of correlation and
One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to test hypothesis 3 at 5% level of
significance. The result shows that there is a highly significant relationship between
teachers’ competence, motivation, and students’ academic achievement in Economics. It
was therefore recommended that the government body in charge of recruiting teachers
should ensure that competent and motivated teachers are employed in the teaching and
learning of Economics.

Keywords: Teachers, competence, motivation, academic achievement and Economics.