Creative Hands Development through Creative Exploration among Upper-Basic Intermediate Science Students with Varied Intellectual Abilities in Gboko, Benue State, Nigeria
Keywords:
Creative Hands Development (CHD), Creative Exploration (CE), Intermediate Science (IS), Varied Intellectual Abilities (VIA)Abstract
This study investigated how creative exploration impacts the development of creative hands in upper-basic Intermediate Science students with diverse intellectual capabilities in Gboko, employing a quasi-experimental design with a pre-test/post-test and a non-equivalent control group. Two research questions and two hypotheses formed the basis of the investigation. The population of this study was 1,823 (995 male and 828 female) Upper-Basic III (UB3) students in 24 government grant-aided schools in Gboko Local Government, and a sample of 70 Upper-Basic III students, including 35 (17 male and 18 female) in the Experimental Group and 35 (13 male and 22 female) in the Control Group, was used for this study. A multi-stage sampling procedure was adopted for the study (stratified, purposive and simple random samplings inclusively. Creative Hand Design Test (CHDT) was validated by five experts, trial-tested, and test scores collected were computed using Pearson Product Moment Correlation (PPMC) statistics, which yielded a reliability coefficient of 0.997, and it was used for data collection. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer research questions, and Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was used for the test of hypotheses. Findings revealed that there was a significant difference in the mean creative hands development scores of students taught Intermediate Science using Creative Exploration (CE) and those taught using Expository Teaching (ET) in favour of the Creative Exploration group. More so, there was no significant difference in the mean creative hands development among students with varied intellectual abilities taught Intermediate Science using Creative Exploration. The study recommends that science teachers should adopt Creative Exploration as a preferred instructional strategy in teaching Intermediate Science, as it enhances students’ creative hands development more effectively than Expository Teaching.
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