ABSTRACT

There is a perceived trend of poor academic achievement and interest of students in Christian Religious Studies in Nigeria schools today. This situation has been attributed to many factors one of which is poor method of teaching. Against this background that this study sought to assess the effect of role play method on students academic achievement and interest of students in CRS in Ebonyi Central Education Zone of Ebonyi State. It adopted quasi experimental design. Six research questions and four null hypotheses guided the study. The population of the study comprised of nine thousand one hundred and eighty five (9185) in all the 48 government co-educational secondary schools in Ebonyi Central Education Zone, Ebonyi State. Purposive sampling technique was used to select one hundred and twenty (120) students from four co-educational schools (70 students for experimental group (31 males and 39 females) and 50 students for control group (17 males and 33 females)) for the study. The instrument for data collection was CRS Achievement Test (CRSAT) and CRS Interest Inventory (CRSII). Mean and standard deviation was used to answer the research questions while analysis of co-variance (ANCOVA) was used to test the hypotheses at an alpha level of 0.05.the results of the data analyzed revealed That there is a significant difference in the mean achievement scores of students taught CRS using role-play method and those taught using lecture method in favour of group taught CRS using role-play method, that there is a significant difference in the mean interest scores of students taught CRS using role-play method and lecture method in favour group taught CRS using role-play method. The result equally revealed that gender is not significant on student’s achievement in CRS and that role-play instructional strategy is gender friendly. The null hypotheses tested revealed that gender is not significant on students’ interest in CRS, that there is no  significant interaction effect between gender and instructional treatment with respect to students achievement, and that there is significant interaction effect between gender and instructional treatment with respect to students interest. Based on these findings, recommendations and suggestions for further studies were made therein.