ABSTRACT
The study was carried out to determine the effect of suggestopedia instructional technique on academic achievement, interest and retention of metalwork students of technical colleges. Six research questions were answered while nine null hypotheses formulated were tested at a 0.05 level of significance. The study adopted a quasi-experimental design and was carried out in Lagos State. The population for the study was 410 male and female students. The sample size for the study was 114 metalwork second-year students which comprised 72 males and 42 females randomly selected from two technical colleges. The instruments for data collection were metalwork cognitive achievement test and metalwork interest inventory. To ensure content validity of the metalwork cognitive achievement test (MWCAT), a test blue print (Table of Specifications) was built for the test. The, MWCAT, metalwork technology interest inventory, suggestopedia instructional technique, metalwork technology lesson plan and the training plans for metalwork technology teachers and students were subjected to face validation by three experts. The MWCAT was trial tested for the purpose of determining the psychometric indices of the test. A total of 40 items of the MWCAT had good difficulty, discrimination and distractor indices. In addition to face -validation, the metalwork interest inventory was also subjected to construct validation using factor analysis. Out of 62 items, a total of 40 items were finally selected for the interest inventory. The Kuder Richardson 20 (K-R20) was employed for determining the reliability of the metalwork cognitive achievement test while Cronbach alpha reliability method was used to determine the internal consistency of the metalwork interest inventory and 0.82 was obtained. The data collected were analyzed using Mean, to answer the research questions while analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was used to test the nine hypotheses formulated. The study found out that students taught metalwork with suggestopedia had a higher mean achievement score than those students taught using traditional teaching method in the achievement test, it was also found that students taught metalwork with suggestopedia had a higher mean interest score than those students taught using traditional teaching method in the interest inventory items and students taught metalwork with suggestopedia had a higher mean score than those students taught using the traditional teaching method in the test for retention of learning. There was a significant difference between the mean achievement scores of students taught with suggestopedia instruction technique and those taught with traditional method in metalwork. It was recommended that metalwork teachers in technical colleges should adopt the use of the suggestopedia instructional technique to teach metalwork trades to students. It was also recommended that facilities that could encourage the use of suggestopedia should be provided to metalwork teachers in technical colleges.