Appraisal of Problems Faced by Early Childhood Care Education Pre-Service Caregivers on Teaching Practice in Jema’a Lga, Kaduna State

Abstract

Instruction exercise is an aspect of the student-teacher professional training curriculum and important slice of any teacher tutoring programme in Nigeria. Early Childhood Care and Education programme provides pre-service caregivers opportunity to acquire necessary professional skills through teaching practice. Initial infant care and schooling programme is a double major programme at the Nigeria Certificate in Education, in College of Education, Gidan-Waya. Pre-service caregivers faced personal, supervision and cooperating school problems during their practical teaching experience which is the interest of the study. Four research questions were raised and two hypotheses tested by chi-square and t-test statistics. Five cooperating schools in Gidan-Waya and Kafanchan towns and forty pre-service caregivers in the Department of Early Childhood Care and Education of the college in the 2022/2023 academic session were randomly selected. A Finding from the study showed a correlation between personal and school related problems, cal. x2 2.837 with p. value 0.004 at 0.05 level of significance. Another finding was that the cal. t-value exceed the crit. t, thus a difference exists between problems of supervision being faced by male and female caregivers on teaching practice in Jema’a Local Government Area of Kaduna State. The pre-service caregivers faced inadequate and ineffective used of teaching aids, unfriendly nature or approach of supervisors and inadequate teaching or play facilities while on their practical teaching experience. These problems were personal, supervision and cooperating school related. In view of this, the study recommended that pre-service caregivers should have robust orientation that will highlights these problems, before embarking on teaching practice exercise.