Teachers and Students Attitude Towards the Use of Low-Cost Material as Alternative Chemistry Tools
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Description
This book consists of the research that was conducted in secondary schools of Rwanda. It expresses the attitudes towards the use of low-cost materials for teaching and learning chemistry. It also indicates the findings to evaluate their significance to improve students' conceptual understanding and retention of scientific concepts. The abstract of this book is the following: This study aimed to investigate how teachers and students felt about the use of low-cost teaching resources as alternatives and how they affected students' academic performance in chemistry. The study answered four research questions. The research was a one-group pretest-posttest, experimental, and control group design, and it employed a quantitative and qualitative study. A sample of 330 students was calculated from a population of 24,523 senior two students at district level and a sample of 18 teachers that participated in filling out survey questionnaires in Kayonza district; hence the total population of the whole was 348 participants. The grouping of students into experimental and control groups was done through a non-random sampling technique, which was based on, each group being composed of boarding and day school for experimental and control groups. All groups consisting of 165 students among four selected schools in Kayonza district in Rwanda. Four research instruments were developed and used for data collection appendices A, B, C, and D. To obtain the reliability, Cronbach’s Alpha was measured in SPSS and was α=.762 for the survey Likert-questionnaire and α=.701 for the chemistry assessment test (CAT) of higher order thinking with Bloom’s taxonomy. It was also found that students exposed to the instruction using low-cost materials agreed at a high level that exposure enhanced higher order thinking skills and positive interest in chemistry. Teachers also appreciated the use of low-cost materials at a high level as instructional resources to concretize the lesson, hence better understanding that positively affects students academic performance in chemistry.