Assessment of Styles of Teaching Building Structures in Architecture in Southwestern Nigerian Public Universities

There are several teaching styles in the literature that have been traditionally used in the teaching of Building structures to students of Architecture. Nevertheless, they have all been streamlined into two styles: didactic and interactive styles of teaching and upon these that the assessment of this study was based. This study assessed styles of teaching Building structure courses to Architecture students in Southwestern Nigerian public Universities, with a view to improving the performance of the students in these courses. Quantitative research approach was adopted and employed descriptive survey. The principal survey techniques used was questionnaire. Five public universities approved by the National Universities Commission and Architects Registration Council of Nigeria were purposively sampled. A total of 702 questionnaires were administered to all the pre-final and final year students in the Department of Architecture of the sampled universities, while only 541 questionnaires were adequately completed and considered fit for analysis. Cross tabulation with chi-square was used to summarize the data. The study revealed that the teachers were using both didactic and interactive teaching styles. The conclusion here was that the teachers were not using interactive teaching styles fully in teaching the courses to students which led to poor performance of students in the courses. Therefore, the study recommended that strong priority should be given to the quality of teaching by using interactive teaching style only in the teaching of Building structures.