Technical Skills of Design and Technology Teachers

Abstract

Technical skills involve the knowledge and mastery of a particular field especially in areas that deal with methods, process, procedures and techniques. This research was carried out to determine the degree of; knowledge, skills, and constraints of the teachers in the subject of Technical Skills in Design and Technology, Electrical and Electronics. A quantitative survey was the research methodology that was adopted in this study. The sample size of this study was 160 teachers of secondary schools in the southern region of Malaysia. The questionnaire consisted of 21 questions in a 5-point Likert scale. The suitability of the questionnaire developed was identified by carrying out a pilot study. The findings of the pilot study revealed that the reliability that was derived out of the Alpha value of Cronbach was 0.94. The Statistical Package of the Social Sciences was used to analyse the data and provide the frequency, percentage, standard deviation and mean scores value. The results revealed that the level of mean is high in all the variables with the level of knowledge of the teachers having a mean of 3.86 and a standard deviation of 0.95, the level of technical skills of the teachers having a mean of 3.87 and a standard deviation of 0.98 and the constraint the Design and Technology (RBT) teachers face having a mean of 4.82 and a standard deviation of 0.40. The overall findings are that Technical Skills with the Design and Technology subject in the Electrical and Electronics subtopic is at high level with a mean score of 4.82 and standard deviation of 0.40. This implies that teachers have good background knowledge in Electrical and Electronics subtopic, but they might be having challenges in implementing the knowledge to practical context because of some limitations.