Learning Strategies of High School Biology Students and Improvement of Biology Instruction

Abstract

The study aimed to look into students’ (1) learning aids and strategies as affected by personal factors, and (2) learning environment and their influence on how they learn biology, for the purpose of culling from them some cues that may be useful in improving instruction in high school biology and in motivating students to study harder and to participate actively in the biology class. With the view of eliciting students’ ways of learning biology, journal notes, questionnaire-checklist on personal learning aids/strategies, instructional aids checklist, learning resources rating scale, and class activities rating scale questionnaire were administered to 30 second year students in one of the public high schools in the Visayas.

The respondents represented high, middle and low performers; they were observed in class and interviewed in-depth in separate venues. Class observation report was focused on teaching aids, teaching-learning activities and assessment. To verify and validate the finding in the qualitative data, triangulation was employed.

In quantitative analysis, the statistical tools used were mean, frequencies and percentages. Krushkall Wallis and Mann-Whitney U test were used to determine if there is a significant difference among the respondents in the learning aids/strategies commonly used in reading, in reviewing for an exam, and in taking down lecture notes when they are grouped according to learning performance, learning style and gender.