Effect of paper-and-pencil concept mapping Strategy on the academic achievement of secondary school Physics students in Rivers state.

Abstract

Low level achievement of secondary school Physics students' has been widely reported and the instructional strategy used by the Physics teacher has been implicated to be the major cause of this low achievement. Hence, the need to determine the effect of paper-and-pencil concept mapping strategy on the academic achievement of secondary school Physics students’ in Rivers State. The study adopted the qausi-experimental research design using pre-test and post-test treatment and control groups. Purposive sampling technique was employed to obtain a sample of 130 Senior Secondary Two Physics students from Community Secondary School (C.S.S) Omoku. The Sample consists of 78 males and 42 females. The instrument was the Physics Achievement Test (PAT) to measure students’ achievement. The instrument was pilot tested to ascertain reliability. The reliability coefficient was 0.92 using Kuder-Richardson Formula 21. Three research questions and three hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. Data was analyzed using t-test. Findings revealed that there is a significant difference in the academic achievement of students’ taught using paper-and-pencil concept mapping strategy. Also, there was no significant effect of gender on the achievement of Physics students taught using concept mapping strategy, but on the achievement of Physics students taught without concept mapping, there was significant effect of gender. Therefore, it was recommended that the Government, Curriculum planners, textbook writers, administrators and teachers should introduce the use of concept mapping strategy in the teaching and learning of Physics in secondary schools in Nigeria to improve students achievement in Physics.