Teaching Trajectories and Students’ Understanding of Difficult Concepts in Biology in Obio/Akpor Local Government Area in Rivers State

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of teaching trajectories on students’ understanding of difficult concepts in Biology.Two research questions and two null hypotheses guided the study which was carried out in Obio/Akpor LocalGovernment Area of Rivers State. Two public coeducational schools out of thirteen drawn through purposive samplingtechniques were used. The instrument for data collection, the Students’ Photosynthesis Achievement Test (SPAT) wasvalidated and its reliability coefficient was 0.78. Three intact streams of SS 1 classes in the two schools assigned tobook-ending, guided discussion and jigsaws groups were used. The sample consisted of two hundred and thirteen SS 1Biology students. Mean and standard deviations were used to answer the two research questions while paired t-testsand ANCOVA were used to answer the two hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The study revealed that though thethree instructional strategies of book-ending, jig-saws and guided discussion enhanced students’ understanding ofdifficult concept in Biology as shown by the improved achievement scores, the jig-saw strategy was the best. It alsorevealed that there was a significant difference between the achievement of males and females in favour of females inthe three groups. Recommendations made based on the findings of the study included that teachers adopt the jigsawstrategy to enhance students’ understanding of difficult concepts in Biology.