Educating Students for Creativity and Entrepreneurship Skills Development in Public Secondary Schools in Rivers State

The main trust of this study was to investigate how we can educate students for creativity and entrepreneurship skills development in public secondary schools in Rivers State. Two research questions and two hypotheses guided the study which adopted descriptive survey research design. The population of the study comprised of 8, 694 teachers in the 274 public secondary schools in Rivers State. A sample of 870 teachers (470 male and 400 female) was drawn through stratified random sampling technique. Data were collected with a self-structured questionnaire entitled: “Educating Students for Creativity and Entrepreneurship Skills Development Questionnaire (ESCESDQ)”. The instrument which was well validated by experienced scholars in the Department of Educational Management, Rivers State University, had a reliability index of 0.86 established through Cronbach Alpha Method. Mean, Standard Deviation and rank order were used to analyse the research questions while z-test was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The results of the study revealed that ways we can educate students for creativity include among others: setting up learning activities that allow students to explore their creativity; encouraging creative thinking through the use of provocative questions; and through giving open ended assignments. While, ways we can educate students for entrepreneurship skills develop include among others: use of activity- based teaching method; through school-industry linkage and by organizing internship programmes for students. Based on the findings, conclusion was drawn and the following recommendations among others were made: government should on regular basis organize seminars/workshops to refresh teachers pedagogical skills; and teachers should motivate their students to acquire creative and entrepreneurship skills because they are critical to individual and national development.