Abstract:
History and Government is an important subject in the Kenyan secondary school curriculum as it has social, economic and political impact in our lives. Despite its importance, students’ mean score for History and Government in KCSE nationally and in Baringo central sub county from the year 2016- 2019 is well below 50%. Performance by gender favors boys as has been noted over the years. The teaching approach that teachers adopt is a crucial factor that may affect students’ motivation to learn the subject. The choice of methodology was informed by the nature of research objectives and research questions. A quasi-experimental research design, specifically Solomon-Four Non-Equivalent Control Group Research design was used. The target population comprised of secondary school students in Baringo central sub county while the accessible population was Form Two students in co-educational sub- county public secondary schools in Baringo central sub-county was 1014 students. Purposive sampling was used to obtain a sample of four Co-educational sub-county public Secondary Schools. Each school provided one Form Two class for the study hence a sample size of 158 students. The instruments used in the study were History and Govemment Student Achievement Test (HGSAT) and History and Govemment Motivation Questionnaire (HGMQ). Using KR-21 formulae, HGSAT yielded a reliability coefficient of 0.871 while using the Cronbach alpha coefficient, HGMQ yielded 0.716 which were above the recommended threshold of 0.7. Data was analysed using t-test, ANOVA and ANCOVA. Hypotheses were accepted or rejected at significance level of alpha value of 0.05. The findings of this study indicated that the use of CLS enhanced students’ academic achievement in History and Government better than conventional teaching methods. CLS enhanced students’ motivation in leaming History and Government better than conventional teaching methods. The findings further indicated that CLS was not gender discriminative since it enhanced both students’ academic achievement in History and Govemment regardless of their gender. The findings further indicated that CLS is not gender discriminative since it enhanced students’ motivation to learn History and Government regardless of their gender. These findings may be beneficial to History and Government teachers, teacher trainers and curriculum developers in improving the teaching-leaming process and student’s achievement in History and Government through adoption of a suitable instructional methods. This study therefore recommends that History and Government teachers should blend the use of Cooperative Learning Strategy together with conventional teaching methods and TSC to in- service secondary school teachers on the use of CLS
