Senior high students’ academic performance in stoichiometry the use of interactive simulations

Abstract

The study investigated the use of interactive simulation intervention on students’ academic performance in stoichiometry. The study used action research as the research design. The sample size for the study was 28 students comprising form 2 science students at Keta Senior High Technical School. A pre-test was administered to all the students followed by a semi-structured interview to know their prior conceptions about chemical stoichiometry. A questionnaire was used to determine the factors influencing students' poor stoichiometry performance. The results of students show that a lot of factors contributed to their poor performance in stoichiometry, some of which include low level of interest in the subject of study. After that, the interactive simulation was used to investigate the effect of students’ performance before and after incorporating the interactive simulation intervention on students’ performance in stoichiometry. To determine whether there was a significant difference in the academic performance of the students, the pre-test and post-test were analyzed using the paired sample t-test. There was a statistically significant difference in the academic performance of the pupils, as indicated by the paired sample t-test, which revealed that the t-statistics (6.42) was higher than the t-critical (2.060). This indicates that the interactive simulation intervention had a bigger impact on the students and that they fared better on the posttest than the pre-test. A questionnaire was again administered to examine student’s perceptions about the use of interactive simulation intervention and the results were positive indicating students enjoyed the interactive simulation intervention which had a positive influence on their academic performance.