Teachers’ Level of Awareness of 21st Century Occupational Roles in Rivers State Secondary Schools

Abstract

This study investigated the teachers’ level of awareness of 21^st century occupational roles in Rivers state secondary schools. Three research questions and three hypotheses guided the study. The population of study comprised of 247 public secondary schools and 57 private secondary schools in Port Harcourt metropolis of Rivers state which gave a total number of 9413 participants. The sample size for the study was 860 teachers selected by using the stratified random sampling, simple random sampling and the purposive sampling techniques. Instrument used was the questionnaire titled Teachers’ level of awareness of 21^st century occupational roles questionnaire (TLATCORQ) and personally designed by the researcher using a modified Likert scale of four points. Face and content validities were carried out on the instrument. A reliability test using Cronbach alpha technique which gave an index of 0.80, was also conducted .Mean and rank order statistics were used to answer the research questions while the z-test was used to analyse the hypotheses at 0.05 alpha level. Findings revealed that teachers’ level of awareness of 21^st century occupational roles is just moderate and not very encouraging, teachers do not use technology in classroom instruction and the 21^st century environment has affected the areas of instructional materials, teaching strategies and others. Based on the findings, it was recommended that teachers be allowed to form self-development groups involving more technologically competent colleagues and that professional development programmes organized by the government for teachers should be more strategic and transformative in content and direction focusing more on 21^st century skills and ICT based teaching and learning strategies.