EFFECTS OF PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL LABORATORIES ON LEARNING OUTCOMES IN GEOGRAPHY AMONG SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN NORTH CENTRAL NIGERIA

Abstract

This study investigates the Effects of Physical and Virtual Laboratories on Learning outcomes in Geography among Senior Secondary School Students in North Central Nigeria. The study adopts a quasi-experimental research design. Nine research questions were answered, and nine hypotheses were tested in this study. The population of the study was made up of eight hundred and nineteen thousand nine hundred and eight (819,908) students in the Senior Secondary schools in North Central. Cluster sampling, purposive sampling and random sampling were used to select 768 students from twelve co-educational secondary schools in the North Central States of Nigeria that participated in the study. The schools were assigned to experimental groups; I, (Physical Laboratory), experimental group II (Virtual Laboratory) and Control Group (Lecture Method). A Geography Achievement Test (GAT) containing 30 – items covering topics in cross section, contour representation of land form and relief features in physical geography was used to collect data for both pre-tests, post-test and retention test, while Questionnaire on Attitude of students Towards Geography (QASG) was used for collecting data on attitude of students towards geography, experts validated the instruments. A Pearson product moment correlation and Crombach alpha formula were used to determine the reliability coefficient of GAT and QASG which yielded 0.76 and 0.70 respectively. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation), inferential statistics, analysis of variance (ANOVA), Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) and Sidak post hoc test was used. The hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance. The results of the study revealed that there was significant difference in the achievement of the three groups (F (2, 764) = 1654.14, p < 0.05). Also, there was significant difference in the mean retention scores of the three groups (F (1, 264) = 47.85, p < 0.05). Therefore, it was recommended that Physical and virtual laboratories be embraced as teaching strategies for teaching geography concepts in our senior secondary schools because it has been proven to improve students' achievement in geography.