Effect of Teaching Methods on Unity School Students’ Academic Achievement and Retention in Practical Chemistry in South-East Nigeria

Abstract

The study investigated the effects of guided discovery, demonstration and lecture teaching methods on South East Nigeria’s Unity School Students’ academic achievement and retention in practical chemistry. It was guided by two research questions and two hypotheses, and adopted a quasi-experimental non-equivalent, pre-test, post-test and delayed post-test design. Multistage sampling technique was used to select 226 Senior Secondary Two (SS2) chemistry students from two coeducational Unity Schools, out of 2135 chemistry students in the twelve Unity Schools in the South East, Nigeria 2020 academic session. The instruments for data collection were the Practical Achievement Test (r=0.77), Practical Chemistry Evaluation Exercises for qualitative analysis (r=0.85) and the Practical Chemistry Evaluation Exercises for volumetric analysis (r=0.80). The questions were adopted from the West African Examination Council’s past questions and validated by three experts in Science Education Department of Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike. The reliability coefficients were established using Kuder Richardson, KR20 formula. Data collected were analyzed using Mean and Standard Deviation for research questions, while Analysis of Covariance was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. Findings revealed, among others, that the demonstration teaching method enhanced the students’ academic achievement and retention most, followed by the guided discovery method while the lecture method had the least effect. It was therefore recommended among others that the class demonstration teaching method be used by chemistry teachers for teaching practical chemistry instead of the guided discovery method as recommended by the Curriculum in Nigeria. Furthermore, workshops should be organized regularly by the Federal and State Ministries of Education for chemistry teachers to acquaint them with modern process skills and instructional materials needed for effective lesson demonstrations during practical chemistry classes.