ABSTRACT
This study investigated the relative effectiveness of two instructional methods, namely, Cooperative, and Guided Discovery methods on students' performance in Accounting in senior secondary schools in Plateau State. Five research questions were raised to guide the study, five hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. Quasi-experimental design was used for the study. The population for the study comprised of all the SSII students offering Accounting in Government Senior Secondary Schools with a population of 1,540 in plateau state of Nigeria. Two schools that offered Accounting were selected as sample for the study. The instrument used for data collection was the Accounting Achievement Test. Students in the experimental groups were taught using the two methods separately. The experiment lasted for four weeks after which a post-test was administered. Data were analyzed using the mean, standard deviation, and t-test. The result of the study indicated that students taught using guided discovery method show significant achievement than students in cooperative and control group. However, the performance score of students in control group and those in cooperative group does not significantly differ. It can be concluded that while cooperative method enhance students' performance, guided discovery method of teaching enhances performance significantly (irrespective of the gender or location) than any of the method used in the study. This study therefore recommended that the secondary school sector should be improved through training of teachers in the use of effective instructional method in the classroom, especially in the use of Guided Discovery in accounting instruction in government senior secondary schools in Plateau State.