A COMPARISON OF CONSTITUTIONAL AWARENESS OF THE JUNIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL SOCIAL STUDIES STUDENTS

Abstract

 There was need to find out the level of performance of social studies in constitutional matters, in the area of the extent of coverage of the national constitution in the social studies curriculum and the understanding of the students. This was answer to the call of the former President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, General Ibrahim Babangida for the establishment of another school subject to be called citizenship education in the school system. The new subject has objectives very close to those of social studies and the researcher believes could be incorporated into the social studies curriculum. The study reviewed both the social studies curriculum and the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to see the extent the former covers the latter. It was, however, discovered that the coverage was not much. Considered studies by Gross (1977), Henning (1973) and Naylor (1977) have all agreed on the importance of constitutional and law focused studios in the secondary schools. The studies used the Katsina State Social Studies students of Junior Secondary Three, both in the rural boarding and urban boarding school settings. The study used a sample size of 637 students, 412 urban and 225 rural students.

A validated teacher-made check-list test was the sole instrument of the study. Five null hypotheses were tested using t-test and chi-square statistical techniques. It was found that the general awareness level of Nigerian constitutional matters by junior secondary school students was encouraging. All the five postulated null hypotheses were rejected as the mean score difference was found to be statistically significant at the probability level of P .05, But the junior secondary school social studies students at the urban boarding schools performed better than the rural boarding schools. The study concluded with a call for an immediate review of the Social Studies Curriculum at the Junior Secondary School level and serious attention is paid to the rural schools to equalize then with the urban schools to give the students equal educational opportunity.