Effect of Sequential Multiple Representations (SMR) on the Academic Achievement of Senior Secondary School Students in Electric Circuit

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of Sequential Multiple Representations in Enhancing Senior Secondary School Physics Students’ Achievement in Electric circuits. The intervention involved a sequence of four lessons conducted over a period of 6 weeks, with the first and last week used for pre and post-test. The intervention was set deliberately to push students to use multiple representations in a particular sequence (starting from word to symbols, diagram, and then generating equations) to solve electric circuit problems.  Two research questions and two hypotheses were set up to guide the study. A quasi-experimental research design of a pre-test post-test non-equivalent control group was used for the study. The population of the study comprised all 3600 students offering physics in the fifteen public co-educational senior secondary schools in the Bauchi metropolis. The sample size of the study was 86 using multi-stage sampling. The instrument used for data collection was a Physics Problem-Solving Task on Electric Circuit (PPSTEC) with a reliability coefficient of 0.76. The research questions were answered using mean and standard deviation while the hypotheses were tested using ANCOVA at 0.05 significance level. The findings of the study indicate that SMR can be effective in enhancing students’ achievement in physics and there was no gender difference when students were taught using SMR. Based on the finding it was concluded that the use of sequential multiple representations as a teaching strategy is an effective tool for enhancing students’ achievement. The research, therefore, recommends further research with different sets of students, and in different contexts across Nigeria to provide more empirical evidence on the role of sequential multiple representations as a means of developing students’ problem-solving skills in electric circuit problems.