The effect of guided inquiry instruction in cooperative and individualized setting on secondary school students’ achievement in Abuja Municipal Area Council (AMAC)

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of guided inquiry instructional strategy in cooperative and individualized learning settings on secondary school students’ achievement in biology. Also, examined was the influence of gender on the performance of students exposed to guided inquiry instructional strategy in a cooperative setting. The research was a pretest-posttest control group design. The sample for the study comprises 40 senior secondary school students (SSSII) randomly drawn from two private secondary schools in Abuja Municipal Area Council (AMAC), Abuja, Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Nigeria, the schools serve as experimental and control group respectively The experimental group was taught using Guided inquiry instructional strategy in a cooperative setting while the control group was taught guided inquiry in an individualized setting. The instrument “Genetics Achievement Test (GAT)” which was validated and its reliability coefficient found as 0.80 was administered to the experimental and control group as pretest and posttest, the scores were subjected to t-test analysis. The findings of the study showed that the experimental group performs better than their counterpart in the control group. However, no significant difference existed in the performance of male and female students exposed to Guided inquiry instructional strategy in a cooperative setting. Based on the findings it was recommendations that there is need to encourage cooperative learning the environment in science classes