Eliciting Students' Understanding of the Processes of Governance at the Local Level

Abstract

This paper has discussed knowledge, attitudes and practices (KAP) of senior secondary school students towards governance processes in the local government in Ibadan, Nigeria. On the basis of the theory of political socialization as proposed by Coleman (1986) and the philosophy of democratic education proposed by Dewey (1944), the study assumed a cross-sectional survey design. One hundred and forty-six SS2 students sampled out of three government-run secondary schools by simple random sampling were the respondents. A researcher-designed KAP questionnaire, with a 25-item multiple choice-based knowledge test and Likert-scaled attitude and practice subscales, was used to collect the data. Independent-samples t-tests and one-way ANOVA were used to test three null hypotheses at the 0.05 significant threshold with Multiple Classification Analysis (MCA) and Scheffe post-hoc tests being applied where significant differences were found. The results showed a statistically significant gender difference in political knowledge scores that favored male students [t(144) = 5.14, p < .05, d = 0.85] and in political attitudes [t(144) = 3.53, p < .05, d = 0.58]. There was also a major subject-specialization effect on political knowledge [F(2, 143) = 22.35, p < .001, η² =.24], with Arts students performing better than the Social Science and Science students. These results help us see a very serious gap in formal political education and emphasize the necessity of organized civic education incorporated into the Nigerian secondary school curriculum.