Technology applications in out-of-school time and performance in home assignments among primary school learners in Meru District, Tanzania

Abstract

This paper sought to establish whether the increased use of technology during out-of-school time (OST) by primary school learners improves their academic performances in home assignments. Null Hypothesis tested in this study states that: The improvement in the speed of the use of educational technology by primary school learners during OST will not improve their performance in home assignments. This paper reports the findings of quasi-experiment that involved class six pupils from 6 day primary schools with experimental and control groups of 110 and 46 pupils respectively. Materials used were mainly the Digital Video Disk (DVD), question booklets, and answer booklets. Descriptive statistics and t-test were deployed for data analysis. The t-test (t = 3.20, p (0.002) <α (0.05)) established that the performance in home assignment of the experiment group improved significantly compared to control group. Thus, it was concluded that the increased use of educational technologies in OST, improves the performance in home assignments among primary school learners. Teachers are recommended to assign pupils home works that require the use of educational technology for pupils to take the advantage of the 21st technology oriented century.

Keywords: Out-of-school time, educational technology, academic performance, home assignment, primary school learners.