EVALUATING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF COMPUTER BASED MULTIMEDIA LESSON DELIVERY APPROACHES ON SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS RETENTION IN BIOLOGY IN FEDERAL CAPITAL TERRITORY, ABUJA

Abstract

The study evaluated the effectiveness of Computer Based Multimedia (CBM) lesson 
delivery approaches on Secondary School Students Retention of Biology Concept. Three 
research questions and three hypotheses guided the study. Quasi-experimental research 
specifically Pretest-Posttest non-equivalent group design was employed. The population 
comprised 28,841 (male 12,647 and female16,194) secondary school year one (SS1) 
Biology students in the 88 public secondary schools in FCT Abuja, Nigeria. 120(SS1) 
biology students (54 males and 66 females) were drawn using multistage sampling 
technique. Data was collected using Biology Retention Test (BRT) and stimulus 
instruments were lesson plans on Video Recorded Instruction (VRI) and PowerPoint 
presentation (PP). The instruments were validated by specialists from science education 
department, University of Nigeria Nsukka. The internal consistency of the instrument was 
determined using test-retest method and data correlated using Pearson Product Moment 
Correlation (PPMC) which yielded a reliability index of 0.79. Mean and standard 
deviation were used to answer research questions while Analysis of Covariance 
(ANCOVA) was used to test the hypotheses at 0.05 significance level. Results showed that 
students' taught biology using VRI had higher retention than those taught using PP. Further 
analysis showed that female students had higher retention scores than male in Biology. It 
was recommended that equal learning opportunity should be given to students regardless 
of gender in order to sustain the needed retention ability. Also, it was suggested that further 
studies should explore diverse content in SS2 biology using other CBM approaches to find 
its effect on other psychological variables in different subjects.