g. Students are exposed to real educational experience through the use of instructional materials which develop their sense of self confident that help them to face such circumstance later in life.
h. It does not reckon with human short coming like biases, discriminating, temperature and fatique which can impede learning.
i. It makes learning to be immediate by bringing distance events to the school or learning centre environment without exposing the students to hazard or delay.
j. Good utilization of instructional materials enable learners to learn at their own pace by working individually. They show learners will not be in hurry, there by preventing them from effective learning and the fast learners will not be delayed.
k. It promote equal process to education with the aid of their unique feature of portability, visibility and accessibility because it does not recognize age limit,
l. Language barriers or ecological impediments. These features are mostly exploited in distance learning.
Importantly, the roles of instructional materials inrexchaustible due to various ways that each types or category of them affect communication and information dissemination in school, environment. What is essential to note is that indispensability in teaching and learning process as observed by Onasanya and Adebiya (2007) that “It is not an exaggeration to say that successful teaching and learning depends largely on instructional materials used†this assertion sums up how important the instructional materials (resources) are to educational development particularly in teaching and learning geography.
Concepts of academic performance.
Before going into the concept of academic performance, it is better to know the concept of performance, in order to add more meaning to the concept of academic performance.
Oxford advance learners dictionary (6th edition) define performance as “how well or badly you do something or works†this performance is the ability to do something. In his own views, Akinusi, (2007) performance is said to be the measure of things done, how well or otherwise. He further said performance is a generally accurate measure if how well an individual student is progressing year by year in various skills such as reading, writing, etc.
In the concepts of academic performance, Barth, J.L (2001) define academic performance as the gainful result of an academic pursuit over a period of time. In
this context of this study, it is referring to the educational performance of students in geography which covers the three aspect of the learners i.e. cognitive, affective and psychomotor learning. According to Omuya, J.S (2003), academic performance is the outcome of the knowledge that an individual has achieved in a given period under particular situation, either able or not able to meet the specific laid down standard.
In his own opinion, Adelarin (2005), academic performance is the degree at which performance exceeds falls short of the set down specific standard which would be predicted on the basis of aptitude.
He asserts that academic performance make it possible for education to remediate academic areas. He notes that a specific standard is set in order to determine pass, failure or poor. To expatriate the academic failure and poor academic performance, Adarelegbe, (2005) define academic failure as performance that falls below a specific standard called the pass marks, for example in the West Africa school certificate Examination (WASCE), the pass mark is fixed for 40% and performance that falls below the pass mark is regarded as failure. Poor academic performance on the other hand refers to performance that falls below a desired standard. This desired level could depend on a number of factors such as the difficulty of the test of the ability of students, the strictness of the marking the overall performance of the group or class, or even relevance to the future aspirations of the students. Hence, over all performance a student could be regarded as poor it the students has destination in all the subject but fails in the few subject such as mathematics and English language aspiration.
It is therefore clear that the concept of poor academic performance is much more subject and more all. Inclusive than the concept of academic failure. Hence, if one considers students be said to have poor academic performance to those who actually failed, then the magnition of Nigeria problem in this regard is great.
Adelarin, (2005), identified the following as the factors that are responsible for poor academic performance, especially in geography.
1. Lack of concentration :- He notes that lack of adequate concentration on the part of the students yield to the poor performance. He claims that steps that aids the acquisition and retention of knowledge in study habit of techniques are applicable to almost all subjects.
2. Lack of proper counseling :- He believed that guidance and counseling is important in the process of enhancing the academic performance of the students
3. Communication:- which he described as a decisive factors in the development of the child’s concepts as well as in the release of his or her potential intelligence.
