ABSTRACT
The study was carried out to determine the practical skills in the repairs of four selected digital electronic appliances required of electronic students in technical colleges in Edo State. The gadgets studied were mobile phones, laptop computers, DVD home theatre sound system and LCD television. In line with these gadgets, four research questions were raised and answered using mean and standard deviations, while four hypotheses comparing the mean responses of electronic teachers in technical colleges and electronic technician were formulated and tested using a t-test at a .05 level of significance. The study covered six major towns and four functional technical colleges in Edo State. The survey research design was adopted in collecting the data, using structured questionnaire. The population for the study was 351 individuals comprising 17 electronic teachers and 334 registered electronic technicians, out of these 183 electronic technicians were sampled using the convenience sampling technique, while all the 17 electronic teachers were sampled. The questionnaire was validated by three experts and reliability coefficients of .905, .946, .876 and .840 were determined based on the questionnaire for the practical skills in the repairs of mobile phone, laptop computer, DVD home theatre sound system and LCD television respectively, and .887 for the combined questionnaire for all the gadgets using the Cronbach alpha method of reliability. The questionnaires were administered by the researcher with the help of three research assistants and the whole questionnaires were successfully retrieved. Mean, standard deviation and t-test were the statistical tools employed for data analysis. The mean was used to answer the research questions while the t-test was used to test the null hypotheses. The findings revealed 29, 40, 30 and 29 practical skills in the repairs of mobile phone, laptop computer, DVD home theatre sound system and LCD television respectively that are highly required of electronic students in technical colleges. The values of the standard deviation were relatively low, indicating low variability of the responses of the respondents, while the null hypotheses were upheld. It was therefore recommended, among others, that the teaching and learning of practical skills in the repairs of the four selected digital electronics for this study should be fully and properly integrated into the NBTE curriculum for technical colleges to enhance effective job placement of its graduates.