Impact of the use of the Lesson Plan Manual on the Academic Performance of JSS Pupils in Language Arts in Southern Sierra Leone

The Lesson Plan Manual was introduction in 2017 into the Sierra Leonean classroom for the teaching of Language Arts, as a result of the appalling performance of Junior Secondary School pupils in the BECE examination. The Lesson Plan Manual was introduced following the outbreak of the Ebola Virus Disease which had a negative impact on the educational delivery at all levels of the education system. This study was conducted to investigate whether the use of the LPM had any impact on the performance of JSS pupils. The design used in this study was the quasi-experimental design of the Non-equivalent control group design (NEGD) type with a pre-test and post-test. This design allows for measurement of both quasi-experimental and comparison before and after the intervention. All 63 Junior Secondary School in Bo City served as the population for the study. From this population, 12 schools were selected using the fish bowl method with 16 groups: 8 experimental and 8 control groups. Only JSS 1 pupils participated in the experiment, because at the time of the experiment, they had not been exposed to the LPM at the Junior Secondary School level as they had just been enrolled in JSS 1. Pre-tests and post-tests were administered to the participants from which data were collected. Data were analyzed using inferential statistics – paired sample t-test statistics. The research results show that there is no significant difference in the pre-test scores between the experimental group and the control group, but more importantly, there is no statistically significant difference in the post-test scores between the experimental group and the control group. This means that the use of the LPM has no effect on the academic performance of JSS pupils in Southern Sierra Leone.