Effect of brain-based teaching strategy on students’ retention and self-efficacy in heat energy

Abstract

Inequality in education is a challenge that have persisted and still likely to persist for a long time in the field of education because students come into the classroom with different characteristics. This situation pose a great threat to the realization of classroom objectives especially during physics lessons because students struggle to remember the concepts that have been learnt overtime. The use of adequate teaching strategy might break this limitation thus making every student to engage in meaning learning. This paper has two objectives; (i) to investigate the effect of brain-based teaching strategy on students’ retention in heat energy (ii) to investigate if self-efficacy influence physics students’ retention in heat energy when taught using brain-based teaching strategy. This investigation adopt the pre-test post-test control group quasi experimental design. It involved 99 (experimental group, n= 46; control group, n=53) students randomly selected from two schools in Ondo. A researcher designed instrument titled heat energy test (HET) was used to obtain data for this study. HET was validated by three science education experts and two secondary school physics teachers. The data collected were analysed using mean, t-test and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). The findings from this study reveal that brain-based teaching strategy has significant effect on the retention of physics students in heat energy and self-efficacy did not influence physics students’ retention in heat energy. This paper concludes that brain-based teaching strategy enhances the retention of physics concepts thus breaking the limitation posed by differences in the characteristics of the students.