Teachers’ Gender and Academic Achievement of Secondary School Studentsin Social Studies in Abakaliki-Nigeria

Abstract The study focused on teachers’ gender and academic achievement of secondary school students in Social Studies. Two research questions posed and two null hypotheses formulated guided the study. The population of this study comprised 3,479 Junior Secondary School II students. Questionnaire was used to collect data and data were analyzed using mean and standard deviation for all research questions and analysis of co-variance was used to test null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study revealed that the mean achievement score of female secondary school students was higher than the mean achievement scores of male students. Male and female students taught Social Studies by male teachers obtained higher mean scores than those taught by female teachers and female students taught by male teacher performed better than masculine students taught Social Studies by male teacher and vice versa. The study also revealed that there is significant difference in the mean achievement of students in Social Studies based on gender. Based on these findings, the researcher recommended that Social Studies teachers should re-assess their classroom instructional practice because there is a need for a shift to instructional practices that give the students equal opportunities to excel in instructional activities. Key words: Teachers’ Gender, Secondary School, Students’ Achievement and Social Studies