EDUCATIONAL MEDIA UTILIZATION AND COGNITIVE STYLE AS CORRELATES OF READING HABIT OF PRIVATE SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN OYO STATE, NIGERIA

Reading habit of secondary school students in Nigeria has not been impressive in recent years. This has been a major concern to most stakeholders in education because of its negative effect on the performance of the students in both internal and external examinations. Previous studies conducted on factors attributable to reading habit formation among students have concentrated more on high cost of books, non-existence of libraries, unavailability of relevant books in public secondary schools. This study, therefore, was carried out to examine educational media utilisation and cognitive styles (field dependent and field independent) as correlates of reading habit of students in private secondary schools in Oyo state, Nigeria. The survey research design of correlational type was adopted. The multistage sampling procedure was used. Simple random sampling technique was adopted to select 20 out of 33 Local Government Areas (LGAs) in Oyo State, Nigeria. From each of the 20 LGAs, two private secondary schools were randomly selected; while the total enumeration technique was used to include all the 941 senior secondary school II students from the selected schools. Instruments used were Educational Media Utilisation Observation (r=0.87), Cognitive Styles (r=0.72) and Reading Habit (r=0.78) scales. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Pearson’s product moment correlation and multiple regression techniques were used at 0.05 level of significance. Educational media mostly utilised were smart phones (χ =2.33) and Internet (χ =2.27). Major purposes of educational media utilisation include; learning (χ =2.35), vocabulary improvement (χ =2.14) and reading ability enhancement (χ =2.12). Students’ levels of cognitive styles were field dependent (χ =2.53) and field independent (χ =2.23). Educational media utilisation (r = 0.25) and cognitive style (r = 0.37) had positive significant correlation with reading habit of students. Educational media utilization and field independent influenced reading habit of students in private secondary schools in Oyo State, Nigeria. Proper attention should be given to relevant educational media and cognitive styles of students in order to ensure development and formation of good reading habit among secondary school students in Oyo State, Nigeria.