PREDICTIVE ESTIMATE OF OPENNESS TO EXPERIENCE AND SELF-EFFICACY ON EARLY YEARS TEACHERS’ PERCEPTION OF HANDS-ON MATERIALS FOR CLASSROOM TEACHING IN LAGOS, NIGERIA

The study was carried out to examine the predictive estimate of openness to experience and self-efficacy on early years teachers’ perception of hands-on materials for classroom teaching in Lagos, Nigeria. The participants in the research were all the public and private elementary schools teachers in Lagos however snowball non-probability the sampling method was adopted to select 150 elementary school teachers as the sample. Three instruments titled Hands-on Materials Utilization Questionnaire (HOMUQ), Openness to Experience Questionnaire (OEQ) and Teacher Self-Efficacy Rating Scales (TSERS) were used to gather the needed data. Six research questions were raised while three null hypotheses were formulated. While the inferential statistics of Pearson Product Moment Correlation Statistic (PPMC) and T-test were employed to test the null hypotheses at a 0.05 level of significance, the descriptive statistics of frequency count, percentage, mean, and mean rank were utilized to answer the research questions. The findings of this investigation demonstrated that early year teachers believed that using hands-on materials was beneficial for teaching young schoolchildren in attendance; however, there is no correlation between early year teachers' perceptions of using hands-on materials in the classroom and their openness to new experiences (r-value = -.003, p-value = 0.484 > 0.05); there is no significant relationship between self-efficacy and early year’s teachers’ interpretation of how hands on materials in the lecture hall (r-value = -.016, p-value = 0.844 > 0.05); there is no significance difference in male and female early year teacher’s interpretation of how hands-on materials for classroom teaching (t-value = 1.873, p-value = 0.709 > 0.05). Considering the results, the following recommendations among others were made: Government and private school owners should provide adequate and effective hands-on material(s) and make it accessible to the early year’s teachers; Government and private school owners through the ministry of education should organize on regular basis seminar and or workshop to be training the earlier years teachers on how to use hands-on teaching material to deliver instruction in early years classroom.