Effectiveness of Safety Education Programme on General and Occupational Safety Knowledge among College of Education Students Oyo State, Nigeria

Inadequacy of safety education in Nigeria is responsible for serious accidents at homes, field of play, in the environment and at work. It is indeed difficult to explain the fact that scholars have not paid adequate attention to safety education in Nigeria. Whereas, teachers and school social workers are key stake holders on issues related to school safety. Purposive sampling was used to select two Colleges of Education in Oyo State while fish-bowl sampling method was used to group the schools into experimental and control groups. Three hundred (300) respondents were drawn for the study. One hundred and sixty (160) respondents from Emannuel Alayande College of Education served as the experimental group while one hundred and forty (140) respondents from Federal College of Education (Special), Oyo served as the control group. An 8-week safety education programme was designed to inculcate knowledge on general safety and occupational safety on student teachers. Pretest-post test control group quasi experimental design was used for the study. A self developed questionnaire tagged Safety Education Questionnaire (SEQ) with a reliability of r=0.86 was used to collect data.
Descriptive statistics of frequency and percentages were used for section ‘A’ of the instrument while descriptive analysis was used for section ‘B’ of the instrument. The two hypotheses generated were tested at 0.05 alpha level. The results indicate that there is significant difference in general safety knowledge between the experimental (40.71) and control group (38.90) respectively. Also, there was significant difference in occupational safety knowledge between the experimental (54.97) and control groups (52.97) after the 8-week safety education programme. It is concluded that safety education programme had a positive effect on students’ safety knowledge in both general safety and occupational safety. It is recommended that safety education generally should be injected into social work and health education curriculum to extend the frontier of knowledge where all college students in Nigeria will take courses in safety education.