Attitudes of Nigerian Secondary School Chemistry Students Towards Concept Mapping Strategies in Learning the Mole Concept

The study examined the effect of Concept mapping learning strategies on the learning outcomes of students in Chemistry. It compared the effectiveness of the use of different concept mapping strategies (hierarchical, flowchart and spider) used as advance organizers on students’ performance and examined the attitudes of students towards the use of the concept mapping strategies in teaching the mole concept an important concept in Chemistry in the secondary schools. The study adopted the pretest-posttest-control group quasi experimental design. The population for the study comprised of Senior Secondary School class II (SSSII) students in Ife Central Local Government Area of Osun state, Nigeria. The Chemistry students in their intact classes in three randomly selected senior public secondary schools in the local government area were used for the study. A total of one hundred and thirty two (132) ssII chemistry students formed the sample for the study. The age range of the students was between 13 and 17years. The three schools were coeducational. The schools selected were randomly assigned to the treatment groups. Two research instruments were used for the study. These are; Problem Solving Achievement Test in Chemistry (PSATC) and Questionnaire on Attitude of Students towards Concept Mapping (QACSCM). The PSATC consists of 25-item multiple choice questions with five options constructed to serve as pretest to ascertain equivalence of ability of subjects and as posttest to determine the effect of the treatment on ability to solve numerical problems in chemistry based on the mole concept. The QACSCM consists of 10-item questionnaire, designed to find out the attitude of the students towards the use of concept mapping strategy in learning chemistry. The reliability coefficient of the PSATC was 0.92 while that of QACSCM was 0.66. The two instruments were validated and reliability determined. The supplementary instructional package was the use of three types of concept maps (hierarchical, flowchart and spider) presented to the students as advance organizer. Results showed that there was no significant difference F = 1.19; p = 0.24 > 0.05) in the performances of the students exposed to either Hierarchical, Flowchart or Spider Concept Mapping strategies when used as advance organizers. This implies that using any of the concept mapping strategies as advance organizers produced a similar effect on the students’ performance in their problem solving abilities. Result also indicated that there was no significant difference in the students’ attitude to the concept mapping strategies. That is, those students that were taught with concept mapping strategies have similar attitudes to the strategies (F = 0.69; p = 0.46). It is therefore concluded that the various types of concept maps used in this study were effective and students had similar attitude to the maps.