The study focused on gender and academic achievement of secondary school students in Social Studies. Two research questions such as; what is the effect of gender on students’ mean achievement, and effect of teachers’ gender on the mean achievement of male and female students and null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The population of this study comprised of three thousand four hundred seventy-nine (3,479) Junior Secondary School II (JSS II) students selected from all the secondary schools in Abakaliki urban of Ebonyi State. The instrument used for data collection was Social Studies Achievement Test (SOSAT), data were analyzed using mean and standard deviation for all research questions, and analysis of co-variance (ANCOVA) was used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study revealed that the mean achievement score of female secondary school students was higher than the mean achievement scores of male students. The findings of the study also revealed that: male and female secondary school students taught Social Studies by male teachers obtained higher mean scores than male and female students taught Social studies by female teachers and female students taught Social studies by male teacher performed better than masculine students taught Social Studies by male teacher and vice versa. The study also reviewed that there are significant different in the mean achievement of secondary school students in Social Studies based on gender. Based on these findings, the researcher recommended that Social Studies teachers should re-assess their classroom instructional practice because there is a need for them to shift from instructional practice that will give the students equal opportunities to excel in instructional activities.
Keywords: Gender, Secondary School, Students’ Achievement and Social Studies
