ABSTRACT

The study sought to identify the strategies for enhancing students’ skill acquisition in clothing and textiles education in Universities in Rivers State. Survey research design was adopted for the study. The study had 6 purposes, 6 research questions and 6 hypotheses were answered and tested respectively. The population of the study was 321 made up of Home Economics lecturers and students from Ignatius Aguru University of education and Rivers State University. The total population was used so there was no sampling because all the members of the population was accessible and manageable. The instrument for data collection was a 64 items structured questionnaire titled: clothing and textiles skill acquisition enhancement Questionnaire (CTSAEQ). The questionnaire was structured on a 4-point scale of strongly Agreed (SA), Agreed (A), Disagreed (D) and Strongly Disagreed (SD) with corresponding values of 4, 3, 2, and 1 respectively. The draft copy of the questionnaire was subjected to validation by three validates who are experts in Home Science Education from Department of Agricultural and Home Science Education in Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike, Abia State. (Clothing and textiles option). The reliability was established using Cronbach alpha reliability method to determine the reliability coefficient of the instrument. A reliability of .86 was obtained which proved that the instrument is highly reliable for the study. Data were collected by the researcher with the help of four trained research assistants, 315 copies (97%) of the questionnaire were retrieved and analyzed.  Mean and standard derivation were used to analyze the data collected from the respondents while t-test was used to test the null hypotheses at 0.05   of significance. It was found from the result of the study that there are 10 lecturer strategies, 11 school strategies, 12 parents’ strategies, 14 community strategies, 10 government strategies and 7 non-governmental organizations strategies for enhancing students skill acquisition in clothing and textile in universities. Among the recommendations made were that lecturers in clothing and textile program should adopt the strategies identified by this study in order to enhance students’ skill acquisition and that government through her ministry of education should provide fund and some other strategies identified to enhance students’ skill acquisition in clothing and textile program.