GUIDED INQUIRY VERSUS LECTURE INSTRUCTIONAL APPROACH: THEIR EFFECTS ON NIGERIAN SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE

Abstract

This quasi-experimental study sought to determine whether secondary school students taught history using the guided inquiry approach would perform better in a post-test than those taught by the expository/lecture approach. It also aimed at finding out the comparative performances of male and female students taught using the guided inquiry instructional approach. Two research questions and two hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. The subjects consisted of 45 senior secondary school students of a secondary school in Imo State, Nigeria. These were randomly assigned to two treatment groups as follows: 20 to the guided inquiry and 25 to the lecture/expository group. The pre-test-post-test control group design was adopted. The experimental (E) group was taught using the guided inquiry method approach while the control (C) group was taught with the lecture/expository method. Efforts were made to control for the extraneous variables. The instrument for data collection was a 50 item History Achievement Test (HAT) which was developed and validated by the researchers. The reliability of the HAT was determined by using the Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation Coefficient Statistic and it yielded and index of 0.78. The study lasted for 4 weeks during which the E at C groups were taught 3 topics of African History using the two methods. After the experimental treatment HAT was administrated to the two groups. Data related to the research questions were analyzed using means and standard deviations while those related to the hypotheses were analyzed using analysis of covariance. The result showed that the group taught by the guided inquiry approach performed significantly better than the control group taught using the lecture/exposition approach. The performances of the students were not influenced by sex as a factor. Article visualizations: