Abstract:
The study investigated the effect of reflective inquiry instructional technique on students’ achievement in Environmental Related contents of senior secondary school Geography in Kolga Education Zone, Bayelsa State of Nigeria. The study adopted quasi experimental design. Specifically, the pretest posttest non-equivalent group design was employed. The population of the study consisted of all the 1,820 senior secondary school two (SS II) students who offer Geography in the 14 co-educational public secondary schools in Kolga Education Zone. Four (4) co-educational schools were drawn out of the fourteen schools.A sample size of 160 SS II Geography students were drawn out of the four (4) co-educational schools through simple random sampling technique. The instrument used for data collection was Environmental Related Contents Achievement Test in Geography(ERCATG). The instrument was validated by three experts. The reliability index of the ERCATG instrument was established usingKudder-Richardson (K-R20) method of internal estimate whichgave an overall reliability index of 0.66. Three research questions guided the study and five null hypotheses were also formulated to guide the study. Mean and standard deviation were used in answering the research questions while the null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). Findings from the study revealed that students taught Environmental Related contents with reflective inquiry instructional technique achieved better than those taught with the conventional lecture method. The results also showed that there was no significant difference between the mean achievement scores of male and female students taught Environmental Related contents using reflective inquiry instructional technique. Therewere no interaction effects of instructional technique and gender on students’ achievement in Environmental Related contents of Geography. The study found out that school location either in rural or urban area does not in any way affect the mean achievement scores of students in Environmental Related contents of Geography. Results also revealed that there was no significant interaction effect of instructional technique and location on students’ achievement in Environmental Related contents of Geography. It was therefore recommended that the Geography curriculum planners should carry out a review of the senior secondary school Geography curriculum with a view to incorporatingReflective Inquiry Instructional Technique (RIIT) in order to ensure effective teaching and learning of Environmental Related contents of Geography. That Government should organize periodic workshops, conferences and seminars with a view to training and retrainingGeography teachers on the use of Reflective Inquiry Instructional Technique (RIIT) for effective teaching and learning of Environmental Related contents through the Geography curriculum
