EFFECT OF MASTERY LEARNING TEACHING METHOD ON STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IN FINANCIAL ACCOUNTING

Abstract

 

 

Business education whose objective is to be a programme of excellence is concerned with quality assurance and standard maintenance. However, while very few business education students perform well in Financial Accounting, the vast majority of them perform poorly. It is as a result of this poor performance that this study was conducted to examine the effects of mastery learning on students’ academic performance in financial accounting in Niger state, Nigeria. Two specific purposes, two research questions guided the study and two hypotheses were formulated for the study. Pretest, posttest nonequivalent control group quasi-experimental design was used for the study. The population of the study comprised 3733 senior secondary school students offering Financial Accounting in Niger State. The purposive sampling technique was used to determine the sample size of 198 students for the study. The instrument for data collection was a self-designed Financial Accounting Performance Test (FAPT) which was validated by four experts. A reliability coefficient of 0.96 was obtained for the test item using Cronbach Alpha. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research question, while Analysis of Co-Variance (ANCOVA) was used to test the hypotheses at a 0.05 level of significance. The findings revealed that students who are taught Financial Accounting using the mastery learning method performed better than those taught using the conventional teaching method (M = 85.33, SD = 7.40); there was a significant main effect of treatment of mastery learning teaching method on academic performance of secondary school students in Financial Accounting (F(1,134) = 924.927; P = 0.000); there was a significant gender effect on the academic performance of students taught financial accounting with mastery learning method of teaching(F(1,134)= 4.619; P = 0.033).Based on the findings of the study, it was concluded that mastery learning method has positive effects on students’ academic performance in Financial Accounting. The study recommends among others that teachers of financial accounting should adopt mastery learning teaching methods in their classes because the method is capable of stimulating students learning, which will lead to better academic performance.

Keywords: Mastery Learning Teaching Method, Gender, Financial Accounting