EFFECTS OF THINK-PAIR-SHARE STRATEGY ON SENIOR SECONDARY ONE STUDENTS’ ATTITUDE TOWARDS BIOLOGY IN JOS SOUTH, PLATEAU STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

The study investigated the effects of think-pair-share strategy on senior secondary one students’ attitude to Biology in Jos South, Plateau State, Nigeria. The study adopted pre-test, post-test quasi-experimental research design. The population of this study comprised all SSI students that offer Biology in the 20 public secondary schools in Jos South, Plateau State Nigeria, totaling 1282 students out of which 675 were male while 607 were female students. Simple random sampling technique was used to select two schools from the population. Sample size of 98 students was obtained from two intact classes used, 57 of them were males and 41 were females. The study was guided by two objectives, raised two research questions and two hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. One instrument was used for data collection, namely: Students’ Attitudes to Biology Scale (SABS). The instrument was subjected to three expert’s validation and Kendall’s coefficient value of 0.83 was obtained. The reliability of the instrument was established using Cronbach alpha method and a coefficient of 0.92 was obtained. Data collected was analyzed using mean, standard deviation and ANCOVA. The findings revealed that 19 (33.3%) of the students in the experimental group had a neutral attitude, while 38 (66.7%) had positive attitude to Biology after exposure to treatment. Also, 28 (68.3%) of the students in the control group had negative attitude, and 13(31.7%) had neutral attitude, while none of them had positive attitude towards Biology at the post-test. Furthermore, the main effect of male yielded (M = 50.89; SD = 6.39 and female (M = 59.09; SD = 5.65); F(1,54) =6.69, p < 0.05, partial η2 = .110,  since the p value of 0.012 is less than 0.05 level of significance with an effect size of 11% the null hypothesis was rejected, indicating that there was a significant effect of gender on the attitude of students’ taught Biology using think pair-share strategy. The study recommends that Biology teachers should adopt Think-pair-share strategy to teach Biology in secondary schools and workshop and seminars should be organized regularly for teachers.