Effect of Availability and Utilization of Physics Laboratory Equipment on Students’ Academic Achievement in Senior Secondary School Physics

The study determined the available Physics Laboratory Equipment (PLE) for the teaching and learning of physics in senior secondary schools in Nigeria as well as the extent of utilizing the available equipment. The research design adopted for the study was descriptive survey. The sample consisted of nine hundred students who were randomly chosen and fifty Physics teachers who were purposively selected from forty five senior secondary schools in the south western region of Nigeria.Three instruments were used for the collection of data for the study. They are a self-designed questionnaire tagged "Physics Laboratory Equipment Questionnaire" (PLEQ) with reliability of 0.72, a checklist of Physics equipment and Physics Achievement Test (PAT) to measure students’ achievement. The results showed that the optimal utilization of physics laboratory equipment is effective in the teaching of Physics. The federal schools had the maximum adequately utilized PLE and had the highest mean score,followed by the private schools while the public schools with the minimum available equipment and least utilization capacity had the minimum mean score. The study concluded that science laboratory with adequate equipment is a critical variable in determining the quality of output from senior secondary school Physics.