ABSTRACT
This study investigated the effects of lesson planning and delivery skills on students? performance in Christian Religious Studies (CRS) in Senior Secondary Schools in Kaduna State. The objectives of the study were: to find out the perception of CRS teachers on the effectiveness of delivery skills on the performance of students in CRS in private and public Senior Secondary Schools in Giwa Educational zone of Kaduna State; to determine the difference in performance between CRS students that were taught with lesson plan and each of the following delivery skills: Communication, Questioning, Set Induction, Use of Examples and Resource Development and Utilization (experimental) and their counterparts who were taught with none of the skills (control). Quasi experimental design method was used to conduct the research. In this design, the researcher used pre-test-post-test control group design. The sampling technique adopted for the research was simple random sampling. 162 CRS students and 20 CRS teachers of both public and private Senior Secondary Schools were randomly drawn from the 16 Senior Secondary Schools offering CRS in Giwa Educational Zone of Kaduna State. Instruments for data collection were students? multiple choice test items for students and, a questionnaire for teachers. Data collected were analyzed using frequencies and percentages for the biodata of the respondents while chi-square and independent t-test statistics were used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The results of the study revealed significant difference in the performance of experimental and control groups. By implication, the students taught using lesson plan and delivery skills (experimental group) performed better than their counterparts who were taught without any (control group). This shows further that, utilization of various delivery skills in teaching induces effective result on students? performance. Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended that lesson planning and various delivery skills be incorporated into the CRS curriculum; and teachers should be encouraged and permitted to attend workshops and seminars where the importance, methods of lesson planning and delivery skills are discussed so as to enable them to be efficient at teaching and produce good results.