Abstract
The study was carried out to identify strategies for motivating technical college students towards skill acquisition in woodwork technology in Lagos state, Nigeria. To carry out the study, seven research questions were answered while seven null hypotheses were tested. A survey research design was adopted. The population for the study is 70 respondents which comprise of all 24 principals/vice-principals and 46 teachers of woodwork in the six technical colleges in Lagos State. Due to the manageable size of the population, the entire 70 subjects constituted the respondents from which data for the study were collected. Therefore, there was no sampling for the study. The instrument for data collection was a 107-item structured questionnaire. The questionnaire is made of two parts; One and two. Part one solicited information on personal data of the respondents while part two was structured into seven sections in line with the specific purposes of the study. The response options for the part two were 5-point Likert ratings of Strongly Agree (SA), Agree (A), Undecided (U), Disagree (D) and Strongly Disagree (SD) with corresponding values of 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 respectively. The instrument was face validated by three Lecturers from the Department of Vocational Teacher Education, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. In order to establish the reliability of the instrument, the questionnaire was administered on 13 woodwork teachers in Technical Colleges in Ogun State. The internal consistency of the instrument was established using Cronbach Alpha reliability method which yielded a coefficient of 0.77. The data for the study was collected by the researcher with the help of three research assistants. The data collected were analyzed using mean and standard deviation for answering the research questions while t-test statistics was employed for testing the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. Based on the data collected and analysed, the study identified 18 teaching strategies, 17 educational facilities, 15 SIWES related strategies, 27 laboratory related strategies, 8 employment related strategies, 6 scholarship related strategies and 15 production unit related strategies that could be used for motivating Technical College students towards skill acquisition in woodwork technology in Lagos State. There are no significant differences in the mean ratings of the responses of Principals/Vice Principals and woodwork teachers on 92 out of the 107 strategies for motivating Technical College students for skills acquisition Woodwork Technology whereas, there was significant differences in their mean ratings on the remaining 15 strategies. Based on these findings, the study among others recommended that Federal government should formulate a policy to boost the image of technical and vocational education in the country for improved interest of youth in woodwork and other aspects of technical education.