EFFICACY OF COOPERATIVE AND INQUIRY FIELD- BASED INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES ON SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS' ACHIEVEMENT IN ECOLOGY CONCEPTS IN SOUTHERN BORNO, BORNO STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

The study investigated the efficacy of cooperative and inquiry field based instructional strategies
on secondary school students' achievement in ecological concepts, in southern Borno, Borno
state, Nigeria. Pre-test-Post-test quasi- experimental design was adopted. The population of the
study consisted of 42978 senior secondary student (SS11) students from fourteen (14) public
schools in Borno State for 2023 academic session. Three classeswere purposively sampled Two
classes were used as experimental and one as a control group respectively. The experimental
group 1 and 2 were taught using cooperative and inquiry field based instructional strategy
respectively and the control group was taught using lecture method. The instrument used for this
study was Student Achievement Test in Biology (SATB) with reliability value of 0.84 which aimed
at determining the achievement of the biology students. One research question and one null
hypothesis were used in the study. the Null hypothesis was formulated and tested at 0.05 level of
significance. Data collected were analyzed with descriptive statistic ( mean and standard deviation) to answer the research question. The null hypothesis was tested using ANCOVA inferential statistics. The findings of the study showed that significant differences among the achievement scores of students exposed to ecological concepts using cooperative field based,
inquiry field based and lecture methods exist. In addition, no significant difference exists between
the performance of students exposed to inquiry field based and cooperative field based instructional strategies. It was therefore concluded that cooperative field- based and inquiryfield- based improves students' achievement in biology. Based on the findings of this study it was recommended that government and school administrators should encourage the use of field based instructional strategy for teaching ecological concept in biology