The Effects Of The Presence Of Others And Complexity Of Task On Primary School Children’s Performance

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the current experimental study was to investigate the effects of

presence of others and task performance primary school children. The study

hypothesized that the pupils would perform significantly better on simple task when

they would do the task in presence of others who would similarly be engaged on the

same task as well as in the presence of passive on-lookers than when would conduct

the task alone, and vice versa.

Further, the study hypothesized that girls would out perform their boy‟s

counterparts. The study included 42 standard six pupils whereby 21 were girls and

21 were boys who were obtained through stratified random sampling from Kiwanja

cha Ndege Primary school in Dodoma Municipality in Tanzania.

The study employed Within-Participants Repeated Measures Experimental Design

for data collection whereby the obtained performance scores were analysed through

two way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) for repeated-measure designs SPSS

version 16 provision. The study found that pupils performed slight best in both

simple and complex tasks in the presence of the engaged others. Further, they

performed better in the presence of the passive on-lookers than when alone. The

study also found that girls performed better than boys.

The study therefore recommend the organization of teaching and learning tasks in

primary schools with preference of co-operative, collaborative and/ or other

arrangements which will expose learner to others, particularly similarly engaged on

the given task.

The study further recommends replication of studies to affirm theories in the study

area.