EFFECTS OF GUIDED INQUIRY INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGY ON STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENT AND RETENTION IN BASIC SCIENCE IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS

The study investigated the effects of guided inquiry instructional strategy on students’ achievement and retention in Basic science in secondary schools. Six research questions and six null hypotheses guided the study. The design for the study was a quasi-experimental method. The population of the study comprised all the one thousand, one seven hundred and fifty basic science students of Model Schools in the Delta North Education Zone of Delta State. The sample for the study comprised One hundred and thirty four (134) secondary school Basic science students which was drawn through simple random sampling technique. This study was conducted in two Co-educational Secondary schools drawn for the study through simple random sampling. One of the Co-educational school was assigned to the treatment group and the other to the control group through the toss of coin. In each school intact classes were used for the study. The treatment group was taught Basic science concept using guided inquiry instructional strategy while the control group was taught using lecture (conventional) teaching method. The instrument used for data collection was Basic Science Achievement Test (BSAT) developed by the researcher. The reliability of the instrument was obtained using KR-20 and the reliability index yielded of 0.96. Research questions were answered using mean and standard deviation while the hypotheses were tested using the Analysis of Co-variance (ANCOVA) at an alpha level of 0.05. The result revealed that guided inquiry instructional strategy is superior to the lecture teaching method in facilitating achievement and retention in Basic science. There was no significant interaction between gender and instructional method in students achievement and retention in Basic science. The researcher therefore, recommended that guided inquiry instructional strategy should be used in junior secondary school teaching and learning of Basic science and there is need for an urgent curriculum review to accommodate guided inquiry instructional strategy as a method of instruction in the teaching of Basic science in junior secondary school.