Abstract:
Stimulation Skills (SSs) are those practices used by teachers in engaging children to learn.
Reports have shown that many preschool teachers are deficient in SSs in the South-west,
Nigeria. Past studies were mainly interventions to improve SSs, with little focus on the
lecturers’ pedagogical practices in the Colleges of Education (CoEs). Therefore, this study
was designed to determine the pedagogical practices (preparation for lectures; sourcing and
use of instructional resources; lecture development and delivery; and development and use
of assessment tools) of Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) lecturers as correlates
of pre-service teachers’ SSs in the CoEs in the South-west, Nigeria.
The study was hinged on Lev Vygotsky’s Social Constructivist and Ivan Pavlov’s
Behaviourist theories, while the mixed methods (QUAN + qual) type of triangulation
design was adopted. The multi-stage sampling procedure was used. Five of the six state
CoEs that had ECCE up to 300 level were purposively selected. The simple random
sampling technique was used to select one CoE from each states. The 21 lecturers and 116
pre-service teachers in the Department of ECCE in the selected CoE were enumerated. The
Instruments used were ECCE Pre-service Teachers’ Observation Schedule (r=0.72), ECCE
Lecturers’ Course Material and Assessment Tools Scale (r=0.80) and ECCE Lecturers’
Instructional Resources Observation Checklist (r=0.71). In-depth interviews were
conducted with five ECCE lecturers and five pre-service teachers. The quantitative data
were analysed using descriptive statistics and Pearson product moment correlation at 0.05
level of significance, while the qualitative data were thematically analysed.
Lecturers’ educational attainment were Ph.D. (28.6%), M.Phil. (4.8%), M.Ed. (57.2%) and
others (9.6%), while (80.2%) of the pre-service teachers were female. The quality of the
lecture materials prepared by the lecturers ( = 2.04); the extent to which lecturers use
instructional resources ( = 1.23); the extent to which lecturers adopted student-centred
strategies ( = 1.60) and the quality of pre-service teachers’ lesson plan ( = 1.67) were
low against the threshold of 2.50. The assessment tools utilisation by the lecturers showed
that cognitive-based ( = 1.50) and physical-based ( = 1.50) were fairly used against the
threshold of 2.50. There was a significant positive relationship between lecturers’ lecture
planning skills (r= 0.50) and pre-service teachers’ stimulation skills. Lecturers’ sourcing
and use of instructional resources, utilisation of student-centred strategies as well as
development and use of assessment tools had no significant relationships with pre-service
teachers’ SSs. The pre-service teachers were not exposed to the delivery of child-centred
instructional methods for children. The lecturers hardly used instructional resources to
deliver their lectures.
Lecture planning skills of lecturers influenced the stimulation skills of pre-service teachers
in colleges of education in the South-west, Nigeria. Pre-service teachers in early childhood
care and education department should be exposed to these strategies
