EVALUATION OF QUESTIONING STRATEGY: AS A TOOL FOR PROMOTING STUDENTS’ COMPREHENSION OF SECONDARY SCHOOL AGRICULTURAL SCIENCE TEXTS

The study on questioning strategy was undertaken to assess its influence on reading comprehension of secondary school students’ agricultural science texts. Two questioning strategies were compared and the effect of gender difference on active comprehension of the agricultural science texts was estimated. A sample of 180 students (90 males and 90 females) of the senior secondary I (SS1) was selected using the stratified random sampling technique. The instrument used consisted of two sets of achievement of 24 multiple choice items and three comprehension passages for each strategy. The instrument was content validated and reliability coefficient of 0.68 was obtained. The scores collected were analyzed using the students’ T-test statistics with a confident level of p< 0.05. The findings revealed that, there was significant difference between the pre-reading questioning strategy and the post- reading questioning strategy on active comprehension of agricultural science expository texts. The study also showed that, the pre-reading questioning had relative advantage in mean performance (60.2) over the post- reading questioning strategy (58.61). Also there was no gender disparity in using the questioning strategy to enhance active comprehension of the texts. The findings therefore suggest that either or both strategies could be used to promote active comprehension of agricultural science texts. However, since the pre- reading had relative advantage over the post-reading, its usage should be given more attention