Secondary school students’ achievement and attitude towards chemistry within computer simulation assisted inquiry-based chemistry teaching: Case of Finote Selam Town

Abstract

Both inquiry and simulation teaching methods are active teaching methods that used the frame work of social constructivist teaching approach. This research was designed to examine the combined effect of inquiry and computer simulation teaching chemistry on secondary students’ chemistry achievement and attitude towards chemistry. All secondary school students enrolled in Finote Selam Town were the population of the study. From these all three secondary schools were selected as a sample using compressive sampling technique. From the three schools 90 students were sampled using stratified random sampling method and those randomly assigned to a controlled and two experimental groups. Chemistry achievement test and attitude test were prepared to use as a pretest and posttest. One-way ANOVA was used to analyze the data and from the data analysis, the pretest result of both chemistry achievement (X, M=12.17, EG1, M=11.47, EG2, M=11.17, F=0.618, P>0.05) and attitude test (X, M=2.86, EG1, M=2.74, EG2, M=2.85, F=1.008, P>0.05) were not significantly different among the three groups. But there was significant difference in the posttest result of the three groups (X, M=12.27, EG1, M=14.5, EG2, M=16.6, F=17.05, P<0.05) and attitude test (X, M=2.83, EG1, M=3.24, EG2, M=4.04, F=39.8, P<0.05). From the data analysis inquirybased blended with simulation teaching method was better than both teacher center and simple simulation method. [African Journal of Chemical Education—AJCE 12(1), January 2022]