Assessing Lecturers' Readiness to Teach 21st Century Skills in Colleges of Education in Imo State

Abstract

Digital transformation has heavily impacted the education industry at all levels of education. Teaching patterns in institutions are changing because of the interest in students acquiring 21^st-century skills. Lecturers play an important role in this endeavour and therefore, this study focused on their understanding of the 21st century skills and the teaching approaches required to imbibe them. This is in addition to how they implement teaching in their classrooms for their attainment. The study employed a survey research design. A sample size of 180 lecturers was randomly selected from a population of 986 lecturers from two colleges of education in Imo State. A questionnaire of the 4-point Likert scale was developed for the collection of data for the study. [1]The instrument is composed of four sections with the first focusing on the institution, understanding 21^st century skills, the development and implementation of different teaching methods for teaching the 21st Century skills and the use of technological tools for learning in the classroom. The instrument was subjected to face and content validation by three experts in measurement and evaluation. It was administered on 20 lectures from an institution not used in the study to determine the reliability estimate using Cronbach-alpha and a reliability coefficient of 0.78 was obtained. Data were analyzed using mean and percentages. The findings revealed among others that lectures in colleges of education use methods that promote the actualization of 21^st -century educational goals. Based on the results, it was recommended among others that colleges of education management should organize specialized programmes to further familiarize lecturers with the importance of 21^st-century skills and how they could effectively teach them to learners