Field Trip Teaching Approach and Senior Secondary School Students’ Achievement, Motivation and Attitude in Ecology: Evidence from Niger State, Nigeria

Shaba Umar Badoko, Kamaludeen Samaila, Elizabeth Julius

Abstract


This study examined how a field trip teaching approach affects senior secondary school students’ academic achievement, motivation and attitude in ecology in Niger State, Nigeria. A quasi-experimental pre-test/post-test design was adopted, with intact classes serving as experimental and control groups. The target population was 2,935 Senior Secondary School One (SS1) students in public co-educational schools across the six educational zones of the state. Using the Taro Yamane formula, a sample of 352 students was drawn by stratified random sampling from six schools (three experimental and three control, one per educational zone), and 22 Biology teachers acted as research assistants. Data were gathered with the Ecology Achievement Test (EAT), the Student Motivation Questionnaire (SMQ) and the Student Attitude Questionnaire (SAQ). Test-retest reliability coefficients of 0.80 and 0.85 were obtained for the SMQ and SAQ respectively. Following a six-week treatment, the data were analysed using means and standard deviations for the research questions and the independent samples t-test for the null hypotheses at the 0.05 level of significance. The results showed that students taught through field trips obtained higher post-test achievement scores (M = 75.90) than those taught by the lecture method (M = 72.43), a difference significant at p = 0.05. Motivation (M = 4.19 versus 2.96) and attitude (M = 3.39 versus 2.44) were also significantly higher in the field trip group (p = 0.00). It was concluded that field trips significantly improve students’ achievement, motivation and attitude in ecology. It was recommended that Biology teachers adopt field trips regularly, that teachers be trained to organise them, and that field trips be made a compulsory part of the ecology curriculum. 


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