Abstract
The effect of attitude as a psychological construct that impacts students achievement in secondary schools have been widely reported, and the need to address that non-cognitive trait, so as to improve students’ achievement have been stressed. Negative attitude of students have adversely affected educational outcomes and the need to improve this trait in students is the aim of this study. The study investigated the effect of the 7E instructional strategy on the overall attitude of students of the 11th grade, in Biology, in public secondary schools in Adamawa State, Nigeria. Four attitude constructs, namely; attitude towards Biology as a subject; attitude towards the Biology teacher; perception of importance of Biology and perception of difficulty of Biology; were used in the study. Two randomly selected schools were denoted as experimental and control groups and were taught using the 7E instructional strategy and the teacher-centered methods, respectively. A 38-item Likert-based questionnaire was used to collect data before and after intervention was given. The research question was answered by the means and standard deviations, while the hypothesis was analysed using the Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) statistics. The descriptive statistics results showed that the experimental group had higher mean scores in three out of the four attitude variables, while no significant difference was recorded on one variable. The overall attitude of students taught by the 7E instructional strategy and when taught by traditional teacher-centered method, showed that students’ attitude is positively affected, by the 7E instructional strategy. Therefore, 7E instructional strategy significantly improved students’ attitude towards Biology.
Highlights
Attitude, as viewed by Kind, Jones and Barmi (2007) is a concept that has different components, such as cognitive, behavioral and affective
The study findings showed a decrease in students’ science related attitude towards Biology, which is probably related to stress associated with inquiry, which demands students’ active participation in making meaning of scientific phenomena, instead of the familiar teacher-centered methods that provides all answers to passive students
The research question, which seeks to determine the overall attitudinal response was answered by the descriptive statistics which provides the means and standard deviations, while the Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was used to analyse the hypothesis
Summary
As viewed by Kind, Jones and Barmi (2007) is a concept that has different components, such as cognitive (knowledge, beliefs and ideas), behavioral (tendency towards an action) and affective (feelings, like and dislike). Attitude has been described as the tendency to react in a way, negatively or positively, towards a given object or matter (Harrell, 2006). Some individuals’ attitude helps them to deal with obstacles and challenges, enabling them to achieve their learning objectives. Others have attitudes that slow them down, stopping them from achieving their learning objectives. Those having positive attitudes towards school accomplish significantly better academic achievement than those having negative attitude (Shah, 2009). This study investigates how a teaching intervention, using the 7E instructional strategy, would affect students’ in different attitudinal constructs, beginning with their attitude towards Biology as a subject
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