By Ejinkeonye, Uju Bridget
This study developed an Elderly Care Education Courses for integration into Home Economics Curriculum of Nigeria Certificate in Education(NCE). Specifically it determined: the challenges faced by elderly persons that could necessitate care for them; the objectives of Elderly Care Education Courses (ECEC); the content needed for achieving the objectives of ECEC for NCE Home Economics Curriculum; the instructional strategies and materials that could be employed for teaching ECEC; the evaluation activities that could be adopted for assessing the objectives of ECEC; developed a draft ECEC; validated the draft ECEC; revised the draft ECEC that can be integrated into NCE Home Economics Curriculum. Six research questions and five hypotheses tested at 0.05 level of significance guided the study. The study adopted the Research and Development (R & D) design. The study was carried out in five phases as follows; phase I: determination of the challenges faced by elderly persons that could necessitate care for them by other family members; phase II: determination of possible component of elderly care education courses to be developed, phase III: production of the draft ECEC, phase IV: validation of the draft ECEC; phase V: Revision and development of the ECEC. The study was conducted in South-Eastern Nigeria. The population was made up of 846,960 respondents namely: 63 Home Economics lecturers, 193 Home Economics students, 3,092 nurses and 843,612 elderly. The entire population of Home Economics lecturers and Home Economics students were used. While a sample of 200 nurses were randomly selected and 40 elderly persons were purposively drawn to participate in the Focus Group Discussion (FGDs). Three instruments were developed and used to collect data for the study namely: the Elderly Care Education Courses Questionnaire (ECECQ), Elderly Persons Challenges Focus Group Discussion Guide and Elderly Persons Care Content Focus Group Discussion Guide. The ECECQ was face validated by five experts from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Cronbach alpha reliability coefficient index was used to determine the internal consistency of the instrument and it yielded an overall coefficient of α = .97. The draft Elderly Care Education Courses developed was validated by seven experts namely; two Home Economics lecturers, two Curriculum experts, two Social work lecturers, and one Health Education lecturer. The research questions were analyzed using mean, while ANOVA was used to analyze the hypotheses then, Duncan’s New Multiple Range Test (DNMRT) was used for pair wise comparison of means of items that were significantly different to determine the differences in the means. The findings include 10 challenges faced by elderly persons that could necessitate care for them , 24 objectives of elderly care education, 32 content of elderly care education, 21 instructional strategies, 18 instructional materials and 18 evaluation activities of elderly care education Based on the findings, eight recommendations were made. These include among others that curriculum planners should incorporate the Elderly Care Education Courses developed by this study into the current NCE Home Economics Curriculum.