ABSTRACT: This study examined the Influence of Environmental Variables on Student Academic Performance of Islamic Studies in selected secondary schools. Four research questions and four research hypotheses were formulated for the study. The population of the study was eight hundred and fifteen (815) students who offered Islamic Studies in selected public secondary schools in the study area and a sample size of two hundred and forty (240) was used. A survey research design were adopted for the study, the instrument used was a questionnaire titled “Environmental variables and Students Performance in Islamic Studies Questionnaire (EVSPISQ)”. The instrument was developed by the researcher and validated by the research supervisor. Pearson product moment correlation was used to analyze the data collected. The null hypotheses were tested at 0.05, level of significance.
The Influence of Environmental Variables on Student Academic Performance of Islamic Studies
The result of the findings showed a significant relationship between class room building, school library, school location and the academic performance of students in Islamic Studies. The study also showed no relationship between class size and the student’s academic performance in Islamic Studies.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the Study
Nigeria is constitutionally a multi-religious country with a Muslim population in majority. Based on the unique distribution of religious adherents in Nigeria, religious education is allowed for students in schools with variation in relation to the religion of the parents.
By history, Islamic education has become indigenous in south western Nigeria before the arrival of the colonialists to Nigeria (Rufai, 2011).
Environment can be defined as a system within which living organisms interacts with the physical element while education environment is a learning place where the learner learn and interact with learning facilities in order to be socialized and face the challenges in the society. Agusiegbe, (2014) sees environments as consisting of all elements existing around man and which exert some influence on him. These include physical, biological and social attributes. Environment can also be seen as aggregate of all the external condition and influence affecting the life and development of an organism. An environment is a place where activities such as learning activities take place and can be refers to as school environment.
However, learning environment refers to the diverse physical locations, contexts, and cultures in which students learn. Since students may learn in a wide variety of settings, such as outside-of-school locations and outdoor environments, the term is often used as a more accurate or preferred alternative to classroom, which has more limited and traditional connotations, a room with rows of desks and a chalkboard.
Learning environment (school) includes all the external condition and influences in the school that affect the academic achievement of the student such as laboratory equipment, library facilities, qualified teachers, furniture, school building, good administrative management, teacher pupil relationship, school location among others.
Moreover, School environment (learning environment) is the thread that connects the multitude of activities on the school. In many respects, this thread is almost invisible, yet everyone experiences its influence. Dudek, (2000) opined that it could be said to be the external influences in the school that can influence academic achievement of students irrespective of their intelligent quotient. School environment can also be considered as the second teacher since space has the power to organize and promote pleasant relationships between people of different ages, to provide changes, to promote choices and activities and for its potential for sparking different types of social and affective learning (Okeke, 2001). It has been generally accepted that environment and heredity can hardly be separated from education in influencing achievement, hence a child’s life and ability is influenced by nature and nurture.
Thus, the environmental variable of the setting helps to a large extent in ensuring attainability of the goals of such setting. The environmental differences and the differences in the quality of instruction from one learning environment to another can create differences in the level of knowledge acquisition of the students. This shows that the learning facilities children are exposed to and the socio-economic influence on them can affect their academic achievement.
Maduewesi, (2013) referred to teaching and learning environment as the setting physical and conceptual in which teaching and learning are carried out as deliberately planned. And to Okobia in Maduewesi (2013) learning environment means classroom surroundings, physical facilities in the classroom and teacher–pupil relationship. Learning environment includes the school building and the surrounding grounds such as noise, temperature and lighting as well as physical, biological or chemical agent, (Chiu, 2008). School environment can then be seen to include material and human resources, a learning place which consist of the entire interaction. The learning environment is both the natural and provided setting where teaching and learning takes place. Therefore, this study will seek to find out the influence of environmental variables such as classroom size, school library and school location on Islamic Studies students’ academic performance.
The Influence of Environmental Variables on Student Academic Performance of Islamic Studies
1.2 Statement of the Problem
The environment varies from school to school. Some schools have adequate school buildings, good library and suitable textbooks, good administrative management, professionally qualified teachers, good laboratory equipment as well as good location. While in some schools little or none of these exist.
Islamic studies is a unique subject on the curriculum of Nigerian secondary schools similar to what is obtainable in other countries like Saudi Arabia and Malaysia among others. The uniqueness of the subject is primarily in relation to the policy on the status of the subject in the national curriculum. In the context of the national curriculum in Nigeria, Islamic is one of the subjects for junior and senior secondary schools in the country. It is classified as a compulsory religious instruction for Muslims students in the junior secondary schools 1-3 (between ages 12 and 14). It is therefore by policy a core subject for all Muslim students in the junior secondary school. However, the unavailability and inadequacy of teachers in a given school may deny the students the
The problem of this study put in a question form is: What is the influence of environmental variables on students’ academic performance of Islamic Studies. This question necessitates the study on the influence of environmental variables on student academic performance of Islamic Studies in selected secondary schools in the study area.
