RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MEASUREMENT ERRORS AND SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCE IN SCIENCE PRACTICAL ACTIVITIES

Abstract

Practical activities are pivotal in the teaching and learning of science. Students’ errors during practical activities in the laboratory could be detrimental to the students’ overall performance in science. The study focused on the relationship between errors committed by the students in the laboratory and senior secondary school students’ performance in science practical activities. The study adopted a pretest, posttest quasi-experimental design. The population for the study consisted of all the 6,413Senior Secondary School III students offering core Science subjects (Biology, Chemistry and Physics) in all the 193 public secondary schools in Ekiti State, Nigeria. The figure obtained was as at the time of investigation. The sample consisted of 88 senior secondary school three students offering core science subjects (Biology, Chemistry and Physics) found in intact classes of two government colleges that were purposely selected for the study. An instrument tagged Science Practical Questions (SPQ) was used to collect data for the study. The Science Practical Questions (SPQ), was considered valid and reliable being an adopted standardized instrument from Senior School Certificate Examination (SSCE) past Biology, Chemistry and Physics practical questions.The data collected were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics involving mean, standard deviation and Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation (PPMC) at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study revealed that there was significant negative relationship between errors committed by students and their performance in Science practical. The implication of this negative relationship is that the more students commit errors in Science practical, the less their performance and vice versa. It was therefore recommended that Senior Secondary Science teachers should adopt an instructional strategy like the use of Error Correcting Instructional Package (ECIP) during science practical classes so as to reduce errors committed by students to barest minimum.