Influence of Teacher’s Qualification on Teaching Environmental Education at the Universal Basic Education (Ube) Levels in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria

This study investigated Influence of Teachers‘ qualification on Teaching of Environmental Education at the UBE Level in Akwa Ibom State. An Ex-post Facto design was adopted for the study. The purpose of this study is to investigate how teachers‘ qualification (teacher‘s communication competence, knowledge of subject matter, teachers‘ classroom management, teachers capacity to work with other teachers and teachers evaluation capacity) influences the teaching of Environmental Education at the UBE level in Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria. The study research question was on ―how does teachers‘ qualification (teacher‘s communication competence, knowledge of subject matter, teachers‘ classroom management, teacher‘s capacity to work with other teachers and teacher‘s evaluation capacity) influence the teaching of Environmental Education?‖ One hypothesis was used to guide the study. The researcher designed a 10 items questionnaire titled Teachers Qualification and Teaching of Environmental Education Questionnaire (TQTEEQ) and administered for data collection. Proportionate stratified random sampling was used to select the sample size of the teachers. A sample of 450 teachers was used from the 3 education zones of the state. The reliability estimate of the instruments was established through Cronbach Alpha Reliability Method with reliability index of 0.78-0.81. ANOVA was the statistical techniques employed to test the null hypothesis. The hypothesis was tested at .05 level of significance. The result of the analysis shows the calculated F-ratios at .05 alpha level as follows: TCC (32.23*), KSM (51.92*), TCM (11.22*), TCWS (67.77*) and TEC (196.09*). From the obtained results, the calculated F-ratios of the five sub-variables are each (significant) higher than the critical F-ratio of 3.02 at .05 alpha level with 2 and 447 degrees of freedom. With these results, the null hypothesis was therefore rejected for each of the sub-variable of teachers‘ communicative competence (TCC), knowledge of subject matter (KSM), teachers‘ classroom management (TCM), teachers‘ capacity to work with other teachers (TCWT) and teachers‘ evaluation capacity (TEC) were all significant. This means that there is significant influence of teachers‘ qualification on the teaching of EE in the UBE level in Akwa Ibom state. By these findings, the study recommended among others that learner friendly school can be influenced by the teachers ‗qualification.

Keywords: Teachers, qualification, Teaching, Environmental Education.