The effect of hands-on activity on students’ skill performances and attitudes toward chemistry

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of hands-on activity on students’ skill performance and attitude towards chemistry. The action research design was adopted with an intervention covering four weeks. The study sought answers to these research questions: 1. What is the attitude of students toward chemistry before and after the use of hands-on activity? 2.What is the effect of hands-on activity on the levels of skill performance among students in chemistry? 3.What is the effect of hands-on activity on the retention ability of students in chemistry? Thirty-four chemistry students from Bisease Senior High School, Central Region – Ghana were purposively selected as the sample for this study. Chemistry Achievement Tests, CAT and questionnaire were the instruments used to collect data for analysis. Data were collected from students who participated in this study both before and after the intervention. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse the data. The findings of the research revealed that students exhibited more positive attitudes toward teaching and learning of chemistry after hands-on instructional approach was used. Also, the findings revealed that students exhibited improvement in science process skills when hands-on approach was used to teach chemistry – the mean score obtained on the pre-intervention test was 9.71 compared to 20.41 on the postintervention test. The t-test conducted showed the difference to be statistically significant (p = 0.00, sig. at 0.05). additionally, a large effect size (Ɵ = 1.78) indicated that the difference between the pre-test mean and the post-test mean is significant in practical scenarios. Further, the findings revealed that the performance of the students on the post-intervention test and the retention test, conducted two weeks after the intervention did not differ significantly (p = 0.31. not sig. at 0.05). However, students’ performance on both the post-intervention test and the retention test were significantly different from the pre-intervention test as revealed by a post hoc test. Based on these findings, it was recommended that teacher training institutions such as colleges and universities should emphasise hands-on activity instructional methods as part of their chemistry training curriculum. Chemistry teacher trainees should be subjected to external assessment on the use of hands-on activity instructional methods during their teaching internship programme. Also, the Ministry of Education, through the Ajumako Essiam Enyan District Education Directorate, should allocate more time for in-service training of chemistry teachers on the integration of hands-on activity to empower them, thus, enabling its application in the classroom.