Effect of Use of Combined Physical and Inquiry Virtual Laboratories on Secondary School Students’ Achievement in Physics in Enugu State
Keywords:
Physical laboratory, Inquiry virtual laboratory, Physics achievementAbstract
There had been poor enrolment and poor achievement of secondary school students in Physics over the years in Enugu state. Thus, the researchers were motivated to investigate the effect of use of combined physical and inquiry virtual laboratories (CPIVL) on achievement of senior secondary two (SS2) students in Physics in Enugu State, Nigeria. Two research questions guided the study and three null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 alpha level. The research adopted a non-equivalent control group quasi experimental design. The population of the size was 3, 206 SS2 students. Two hundred and twenty (220) SS2 physics students (120 males and 100 females) formed the sample size. The sample was composed using two stage sampling procedure. The research instrument used was Electricity Achievement Test (EAT). The EAT and lesson plan were validated by three experts. The reliability index was established using, the Kudar Richardson Formula 20 which yielded reliability coefficient of 0.77. Experimental group was taught using CPIVL while the Control group was taught using physical laboratory only. Data were collected by administering EAT to the participants as pre-test and post-test. The data analysis was carried out using mean, standard deviation and analysis of covariance. The findings showed that the use of combined Physical and Inquiry Virtual Laboratories had more positive effect on students’ achievement when compared to the use of only physical lab. The use of CPIVL enhanced the achievement of male physics students more than their female counterparts taught the same way. Based on the findings it was recommended that teachers should expose physics students to virtual lab activities so as to promote meaningful learning, discovery learning and learning by experience among students. Also teachers should make teaching and learning of physics gender friendly by adopting the use of CPIVL in teaching physics concepts.
