Teachers’ Instructional Quality and Students’ Difficulty Level in Financial Accounting at Senior Secondary Schools in Lagos State, Nigeria

Abstract

The performance of senior secondary school students in Financial Accounting had not been encouraging. Several factors could be responsible for the low performance in the school system. Therefore, this study was carried out to investigate the teachers’ instructional quality and students’ difficulty level in Financial Accounting at the senior secondary school level in Lagos State based on students’ and teachers’ perceptions. The study raised and answered three related research questions and also formulated and tested two relevant research hypotheses. The descriptive survey research design was adopted for the study. The population of the study comprised all students and teachers of Financial Accounting in the public senior secondary schools under Education District IV in Lagos State. Specifically, the population was two thousand four hundred and ninety-two (2492) senior secondary school 1 and senior secondary school 2 students of Financial Accounting and ten (10) teachers of Financial Accounting from the ten selected schools. The sample size for this study was three hundred and thirty-three (333) students, using Checkmarket Sample Size Calculator at five percent (5%) margin and ninety-five (95%) confidence level, but three hundred (300) was used eventually due to logistics challenge. All the ten teachers of Financial Accounting were used as sample due to their limited number. The research instrument used was structured questionnaire. The internal consistency of the research instrument was determined using Cronbach Alpha correlation coefficient and it yielded an average index of 0.90. The research questions and hypotheses data were analysed using mean and standard deviation as well as t-test statistical tools respectively at 0.05 level of significance. The results, among others, show that most of the teachers were first-degree holders and had obtained adequate teaching experiences. However, most teachers had not obtained higher academic and professional certificates. Most of the teachers of Financial Accounting were not using activity-based pedagogical strategies. In addition, the findings show that most of the topics in the Financial Accounting syllabus were difficult to students. Therefore, it was recommended, among others, that more innovative and experiential learning strategies should be adopted; proper orientation should be given to students on how to succeed in Financial Accounting; and teachers should upgrade in order to acquire high-class professional qualifications for them to have a thorough understanding of topics, which gave serious challenges to their students.