Content coverage and students’ achievements in secondary school physics: The Delta state example of Nigeria

The issue of qualitative education is all embracing. A student who was thought half or less than half of specified content cannot be said to have obtained a quality education. From the analysis of the data, there exists a general poor achievement across the ten schools in Ministry-made Physics Test. Though the highest is 60%, the average students’ achievement in the test is quite low, 31.28% while that of TMT recorded a highest achievement of 96%, the average students’ achievement stood at 44% which is also below average. This is quite an improvement in TMT when compared with MMT. In general, there was a better achievement in TMT than in MMT. The null hypotheses raised were both rejected. The result showed that students’ achievement in PAT differ significantly between schools with high content coverage and schools with low content coverage. Also, students’ achievements in MMT differ significantly between schools with high content coverage and schools with low content coverage. These findings showed that an increase in content covered will lead to improved achievements of students in examinations. These results are in consonance with Aworanti and Olakanmi (1997) and Igbokwe (2002) that observed that failure to teach an aspect of a subject leads to poor achievements in examinations especially external examinations.