Abstract
The study investigated the effects of constructivists' learning strategies on students' achievement and retention in Biology in selected Senior Secondary Schools in Owo Local government of Ondo State. The study adopted a pre-test, post-test, control, retention, quasi experimental design. A total of one hundred and sixty students from two co-educational schools participated in the study. 80 students served as experimental group while 80 served as the control group. Three research instruments were used for the study. These were Biology Achievement Test, teacher's instructional guide on: constructivists' strategies and instructional guide on conventional method. Two research questions and two null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 levels of significance. Analyses of data were carried out using Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) and Multiple Classification Analysis (MCA). The result obtained showed that there were significant main effects of treatment on students' achievement and retention in experimental group. Male students had higher achievement score than their female counterparts in the experimental group. The implication is that the constructivists' learning strategies should be emphasized more than the conventional method in order to enhance performance of students in Biology, students' learning and social relations relative to more traditional whole-class method of teaching. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n27p627
Highlights
Human mental functions and accomplishments have their origins in social relationships and that knowledge is socially constructed through interactive effort to learn and solve problems (Okebukola, 1984; Ojo, 1989; Alebiosu, 1998; Yunyu, 1998; Esan, 1999; Adeyemi, 2002 and Akinbode, 2006 as quoted by Springer, Stanne and Donovan, 2007)
Biology is one of the science subjects taught in the secondary schools and research works discovered that students do hot perform well in external examinations like WAEC, NECO, NABTEB, because of the chalk and talk conventional method used mostly by teachers
There is no significant difference between the mean scores of male and female students in Biology achievement test when taught arthropods using constructivists' strategies
Summary
Human mental functions and accomplishments have their origins in social relationships and that knowledge is socially constructed through interactive effort to learn and solve problems (Okebukola, 1984; Ojo, 1989; Alebiosu, 1998; Yunyu, 1998; Esan, 1999; Adeyemi, 2002 and Akinbode, 2006 as quoted by Springer, Stanne and Donovan, 2007). They noted that behavioural learning theory states that students will work hard on tasks from which they will secure some sort of reward and will fail on those tasks that provide no reward or yield punishment. In relation to students taught conventionally or with teacher-centered lectures, constructively taught students tend to show higher academic achievement, greater persistence through graduation, better high level reasoning, critical thinking skills, deeper understanding of learned materials, greater time on task, less unruly behaviour in class, lower levels of anxiety, motivation to learn and achieve better and ability to view events from others
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