Influence of Study Questions as Advance Organizers on Students’ Academic Achievement and Retention in Physics in Plateau State, Nigeria

Abstract

This study investigated the influence of Study Questions as Advance Organizers on Students’ Academic Achievement and Retention in Secondary School Physics in Mangu L. G. A., Plateau State. The research design is quasi experimental pretest, posttest and non-equivalent group of independent variables. The total population of students is 1,094 with male population of 787 and female population of 307 drawn from 11 secondary schools. The sample consisted of 97 students with 76 in the experimental and 21 in the control group while the instruments used for data collection was Physics Achievement Test (PAT) for both students’ achievement and retention in physics with a reliability coefficient of r=0.796. The tools used for the analysis and testing of hypotheses were descriptive statistics of mean and standard deviation and the t-test for paired samples variables. The findings showed that students in the experimental group had higher achievement mean scores; students in the experimental group showed high retention ability and that there is a significant difference in the mean achievement score of students in the control and experimental group; there is a significant difference in the retention of students in the experimental group and after the entire treatment period of exposure to study questions. The study recommends among others, that; the ministry of education through the education resource center in plateau state, school administrators and the government provide adequate training and retraining of teachers to enhance their competence and mastery of how to use study question for effective teaching and learning process.