Junior Secondary School Home Economics Curriculum and Students’ Cognitive Thinking Level in Benue State; Implication for Quality Education

This study examined junior secondary school home economics curriculum and students' cognitive thinking level in Benue State and its implication for quality education. The study adopted descriptive survey design. The sample for the study consisted of 310 students at the Upper Basic Level from 10 randomly selected secondary schools offering home economics across the three educational zones of Benue State. Four research questions and one hypothesis were formulated to guide the study. Frequency, percentage, mean and correlation statistics were used to answer all research questions while t- test was used to test the hypothesis at 0.05 level of significance. The findings revealed that concrete reasoning level of cognitive development are more noticeable than that of formal reasoning level and makes them develop operation for the manipulation of objects rather than for the manipulation of hypothesis. There is a mismatch between the students' cognitive thinking level and cognitive demand of their curriculum which led to low performance in HEAT. The findings also stated that Formal Operators perform better in HEAT than their counterparts who are concrete operators. It was recommended that there is need to improve more on the students' formal reasoning level of cognitive development