Impact of Internship Training in Entrepreneurship Education on Upper Basic Education Students’ Skills Acquisition in Benue State Nigeria

This study examined the impact of internship training in entrepreneurship education (EE) on acquisition of two skills by Upper Basic Education students in Kwande Local Government Area of Benue State Nigeria. Four research questions and four hypotheses guided the study. Ninety nine Upper Basic Three students in two secondary schools were used for the study. The study adopted Quasi-experimental design where intact classes were assigned to experimental and control groups using purposive sampling technique. Data were collected using Skill Acquisition Test (SAT) and Practical Skill Acquisition Test (PSAT) of 20-items and 10-items respectively. The reliability for the instruments were 0.97 and 0.89 respectively using Kuder Richardson 21. Mean and Standard Deviation were used to answer research questions while Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study showed that students exposed to internship training approach achieved significantly higher mean scores in EE for soap making and also in Tiv traditional cloth waving (F1, 97 = 253.3; p = 0.00<0.05 & F1, 39 = 37.3, p = 0.00< 0.05) than the students who were not exposed to internship training. The result revealed no significant difference in the mean practical skill acquisition scores of male and female students exposed to internship in soap making and Tiv traditional cloth weaving (F1, 98=1.53, p=0.22>0.05 & F1, 19 =0.20, p=0.66>0.05). The study recommended among others, that every EE student should be exposed to internship training as this will enable the students have real contact with the practical aspect. This will enable them put some skills learned in the school to use