Effects of Hybrid Active Learning Strategy on Secondary School Students’ Understanding of Direct Current Electricity Concepts in Nigeria

Abstract

This study examined the effects of Hybrid Active Learning
Strategy (HALS) on secondary school students’ understanding of direct
current electricity concepts (DCEC) in Nigeria. The study used a pretest-posttest                                                                                                                   control group as the design. Proportionate stratified random
sampling method and table of random numbers were used to select four
co-educational senior secondary schools in Kaduna Educational Zone,
Kaduna State from which 172 physics students were also sampled.
Randomly, the students were assigned to the experimental (n=86) and
control (n=86) groups. Using HALS, the experimental group was taught
DCEC while the conventional lecture approach was used to teach the
same concepts to the control group. The Written Concept Test (WCT) and
the Direct Current Electricity Practical Test (DCEPT) developed by the
researchers with reliability coefficients 0.81 and 0.83 respectively were
used to collect data. The validity of these instruments was established by
experts. Employing SPSS software, data analysis was done using t-test
and effect size based on Cohen’s d. The findings of this study showed
that the performance levels of both experimental and control groups
before treatments were low with no significant difference in their
understanding of DCEC. The results further showed that students taught
using HALS performed significantly better than their counterparts taught
with conventional lecture approach. Furthermore, the result revealed that
gender and school type had no effect on students’ performance when
taught using HALS. The researchers concluded that the use of HALS
package promotes students better understanding of concepts translating
to optimal performance in physics examinations.