Effect of the 7e instructional strategy on the overall attitude of students in biology in public secondary schools in Adamawa State, Nigeria

Abstract

The effect of attitude as a psychological construct that impacts students achievement in secondary schools have been widely reported, and the need to address that non-cognitive trait, so as to improve students’ achievement have been stressed. Negative attitude of students have adversely affected educational outcomes and the need to improve this trait in students is the aim of this study. The study investigated the effect of the 7E instructional strategy on the overall attitude of students of the 11th grade, in Biology, in public secondary schools in Adamawa State, Nigeria. Four attitude constructs, namely; attitude towards Biology as a subject; attitude towards the Biology teacher; perception of importance of Biology and perception of difficulty of Biology; were used in the study. Two randomly selected schools were denoted as experimental and control groups and were taught using the 7E instructional strategy and the teacher-centered methods, respectively. A 38-item Likert-based questionnaire was used to collect data before and after intervention was given. The research question was answered by the means and standard deviations, while the hypothesis was analysed using the Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) statistics. The descriptive statistics results showed that the experimental group had higher mean scores in three out of the four attitude variables, while no significant difference was recorded on one variable. The overall attitude of students taught by the 7E instructional strategy and when taught by traditional teacher-centered method, showed that students’ attitude is positively affected, by the 7E instructional strategy. Therefore, 7E instructional strategy significantly improved students’ attitude towards Biology.