Effects of instructional materials on academic achievement of secondary school students in chemistry in Enugu State

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of instructional materials on academic achievement of secondary school students in chemistry in Enugu State. It covered the topic: matter. Two research questions and two null hypotheses formulated guided the study. Quasi-experimental design and purposive sampling technique were used to select 40 schools from about 50 schools in the sampling zone population. A sample of 20 senior secondary class 2B (SS2B) chemistry students of 10 males and 10 females randomly selected were employed for the study. Researchers developed Chemistry Achievement Test (CAT) instrument on the topic to collect data for pretest-posttest approach. The instrument was validated by experts before it was used. The students were taught with and without instructional materials and assessed accordingly. Mean and standard deviation were used to answer the research questions while analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test the hypotheses at the level of 0.05. The findings showed that students taught with instructional materials (experimental group) achieved higher than those taught without instructional materials (control group). It was also found that the male students performed better than their female counterparts in both treatments. The findings recommend that teachers in the field should adopt the use of instructional materials in teaching chemistry, and also work more closely with the female gender for the improvement of the students' academic achievement in chemistry.