Impacts of Collaborative Learning on Learners’ Academic Performance in Chemistry in Three Selected Secondary Schools of Nyamasheke District
Abstract
Collaborative learning helps students to have active control over their own learning and create both academic and social relationships to accomplish common goals. This paper reports a quasi-experimental research that employed a pre-test and a post-test approach to investigate the impacts of a collaborative learning teaching approach on learners’ academic performance in chemistry in three secondary schools purposively selected within the Nyamasheke district in Rwanda. At each school, two classes of senior two (S2) were purposively selected whereby one class was taken as a control group, while the second parallel class formed an experimental group. Thus, all the control groups comprised 128 students, while the experimental groups comprised 133 senior two students. To collect data, a pre-test and post-test were given to the students. The data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics (i.e., t-test generated by Microsoft Excel 13). The results from the t-test showed [t (257) = -8.05, p = .000; p<.001] which indicates that there is a statistically significant difference in mean scores between the two groups. The null hypothesis, therefore, is rejected in favor of the alternative hypothesis to confirm that students taught using a collaborative learning teaching approach performed better in preparation and classification of oxides than those taught using traditional lecture teaching methods.
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