Impact of Activity-Based Instruction on Grade 11 Learners’ Achievement in Plane Geometry

Abstract

The study was designed to investigate the efficacy of activity–based instruction on learners’ achievement in geometry. The subjects of this study consisted 83 Grade 11 high school learners from two senior high schools, purposely selected from two towns in the Northern part of Ghana. The study adopts an experimental design involving on a pre-test and post-test control design. The experimental group was facilitated using activity-based instruction while the control group was taught using the traditional ‘talk and chalk’ teaching approach. The instruments used for data generation were geometric achievement pretest and posttest. The test was based on two geometric concepts (perimeter and area). Learners’ achievements on the posttest were analysed using an independent t-test. The study showed a significant difference in the posttest geometric achievements for learners in favour of those facilitated using the activity-based method of instruction. Thus, the use of activity-based instruction proved to be a very effective and promising technique to teach geometric concepts. The study also revealed that there was no significant difference in the academic achievement of male and female learners exposed to activity-based teaching. Based on the findings, it is recommended that mathematics teachers should employ activity-based method to facilitate the teaching and learning of geometric concepts.