CREATING ENABLING CHEMISTRY LEARNING COMMUNITY USING ACTIVITY BASED APPROACH (ABA)

Ogundaini R.S.¹, Abdulquadri M.S.², Okediji A.A.³ Uzosike Anthony O⁴, Olumide Adu M.O ⁵

^{1, 2,5}Department of Chemistry Education

^3,4Department of Integrated Science Education

Federal College of Education (Technical) Akoka, Lagos

Email: uzosikeokechuckw@gmail.com

ABSTRACT

In view of the usefulness of chemistry to nearly all fields of human endeavor, the poor achievement and retention of student in chemistry in college has been a source of concern. Most of the time, poor achievement and retention are caused by poor teaching methods used by chemistry teachers, therefore this study examined possible ways of enhancing chemistry students’ achievement by creating enabling learning community through activity based approach. The study employed pretest-posttest, control group quasi experimental research design. Chemistry achievement test (CAT) was developed by the researchers and administered to 150 chemistry student (boys and girls) in secondary school in SS2 from six (6) randomly selected secondary schools. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and the hypotheses were tested using chi-square which gave result that there is significant difference between student exposed to ABA and those exposed to conventional learning. Hypothesis one, t-calculated=23.605 and t-critical=1.960 with a significance level of p<0.05, hypothesis two t-calculated=0.623 and t-critical =1.960. Results obtained reviewed that students perform better in chemistry when taught using ABA as compared to conventional method. However, findings from hypothesis two reveal that gender has no significant effect on students’ academic achievement. Analysis of the study also found that post-test scores shows that experimental group had a mean score of 19.25 while the control group had a mean score of 8.62, this implies that ABA had a positive effect on the student’ academic achievement. It was concluded that ABA is more effective than conventional learning strategy. It was also recommended that ABA should be replicated in all science disciplines.

Keywords:  

Creating Enabling, Chemistry, Learning Community, Activity-Based Approach