Assessing the Reasoning Skills of Biology Students in Selected Senior High Schools in Ghana

Abstract

This study is on assessing laboratory skills of biology students in selected senior high schools. One public/government science school offering biology was selected randomly and one private science school offering biology was also selected purposively for this study. A task was developed to assess the laboratory skills in reasoning. Mann-Whitney U tests was used to analyze the scores. On gender difference in the achievement of the reasoning skills, males scored higher than females but the result was not statistically significant. On school type, private school students scored higher than public school students but the results were however not statistically significant. It was recommended that students from both private and public school must be made to perform more science activities that require them to do more reasoning in order to develop their reasoning skills.