Availability of Intellectual Development Programmes in Primary School Libraries and Their Impact on Pupils’ Academic Performance
- January 13, 2021
- Posted by: RSIS Team
- Categories: Education, IJRISS
International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume IV, Issue XII, December 2020 | ISSN 2454–6186
Faustina Chioma Haco-obasi
Federal University of Technology, Owerri, Nigeria
Abstract:-Intellectual development of children is initiated by education and library is one of the core aspects of education. Intellectual development is concerned with how various mental processes like attention span, reasoning, learning, remembering and problem-solving develop from birth until adulthood. Given this, there is a direct connection between the library resources and programmes and the ultimate development of the intellect of the child. This work understudied ten (10) selected private primary schools from South-East and South-South geopolitical zones of Nigeria to determine the available intellectual development programmes and resources of their libraries. The test scores of 300 pupils in six subjects were taken before and after intensive exposure to the intellectual development programmes to establish their effect on academic performance. The findings indicated the availability of such programmes as well as print resources for developing the pupils’ intellect but very few electronic resources. The one-sample T-test was employed to test the positive significant effect of available intellectual development programmes in improving pupils’ academic performance. The calculated value (24.28177) of the student t-test statistic is greater than the tabulated value (1.6715) at 0.05 level of significance and therefore rejected the null hypothesis that there’s no positive significant effect of available programmes in improving pupils’ academic performance cross all selected primary schools in the states. The findings of the study led to the conclusion that there is a significant positive impact of intellectual development programmes on pupils’ academic performance.
Keywords: Intellectual development programmes, school libraries, school library resources, academic performance
1.0 Introduction
Children are born with a varying degree of intelligence. Right from the onset of life, children develop their theory about life; how people and other living things move around in the world. In early childhood, children do not just glare and observe things around them, they apply their explanatory theories which enable them to explore such knowledge. Thus Children become inquisitive and start asking many questions thereby exhibiting the capability to understand, explore and experiment into new ground in early childhood[1]. Saffran [2] opines that infants and toddlers derive implicit theories to explain the actions of objects and behaviour of people around them and these theories form the foundation for causal learning and more sophisticated understanding of the physical and social worlds.Young children are keenly responsive to what they can learn from the actions and words directed to them by other people and such capacity for joint attention provides a setting for them to benefit from culturally transmitted knowledge [3]. Children’s ability to exhibit these tendencies enable them to adapt and interact effectively with their environment. As they grow older, their thinking faculties undergo more advanced changes enabling them to develop the capacity to explore and learn much more, better things around them. The order in which children’s thinking mature is the same for all, although the pace varies from child to child [4]. These sequential developments of a child’s mind and thinking theories about life are seen as Intellectual development. Therefore, Intellectual development is the way a child’s mind and brain functions, develops and their ability to communicate, think in creative and abstract terms, learn to solve problems, pay attention, make sense of the world around them, be able to make judgements and reach conclusions [5]
Discussions on Intellectual development in children commenced with a premier study by a biologist and psychologist, Piaget and Inhelder [4]who developed theories of cognitive development based on observation and experiments with children. Piaget’s study outlined Assimilation and Accommodation processes as the two processes which children undergo to achieve a clear grasp of the world around them. These processes come into play whenever children discover something new within his environment. Intellectual development therefore is characterised by how various mental processes – attention span, understanding information, reasoning, learning, retentive ability, problem-solving and critical thinking develop from birth until adulthood.
