Effect of Wait Time on Academic Performance of Secondary School Students in Chemistry in Niger State, Nigeria

Abstract

In chemistry instruction, asking questions and following them with an appropriate wait time is an important component of teaching chemistry. Using wait time by teachers can help improve students' academic performance in chemistry. This study was carried out to investigate the effect of wait time on the academic performance of secondary school students in chemistry in Niger State, Nigeria. The study investigated: i. the effect of wait time on secondary school students' performance in chemistry; ii. the effect of gender on the academic performance of secondary school students in chemistry, and iii. the interaction effect of wait time and gender on academic performance of secondary school students in Chemistry. The study was a quasi-experimental design involving pre-test and post-test research design. The study used two groups; experimental and control. The experimental group (EG) is exposed to experimental treatment (X₁). That is, teaching using the wait time instructional technique. While the control group (CG) is taught using a conventional teaching method (X₀). Three research questions were answered in the study. The study's findings indicated differences in the mean score performance for the experimental group and those in the control group (Experimental group, Mean=18.60, SD=3.46; Control group, Mean=11.73, SD=1.94). These implied that the experimental group performed better than the control group with a difference of 6.87, gender does not influence the performance of the students after using a one-way ANOVA to see the group with favoured performance, it was established that the p-value is greater than the 0.05 which indicated an insignificant difference in the students' performance based on gender and no significant interaction effect of wait time and gender on academic achievement of the secondary school students. It was recommended, among others, that similar studies are suggested to be conducted on other difficult concepts in senior secondary school chemistry as well as some other science subjects like Physics and Mathematics. Also, it is recommended that some other variables like recall, awareness and acceptability of the wait time strategy could be researched in future studies for more robust findings.