Improving Secondary School Students’ Achievement and Retention in Biology Through Video-Based Multimedia Instruction

The study examined the effects of video-based multimedia instruction on secondary school students’ achievement and retention in biology. In Nigeria, 120 students (60 boys and 60 girls) were randomly selected from four secondary schools assigned either into one of three experimental groups: Animation + Narration; Animation + On-screen Text; Animation + Narration + On-screen Text or a control group. The pretest, posttest experimental, and control group design was adopted. A 50-item multiple-choice objective test termed Biology Achievement Test (BAT) was used for collecting data. The validated BAT was tested for reliability using Kuder Richardson (KR20), which yielded 0.89. T-test, analysis of covariance (ANCOVA), and Scheffe’s post-hoc analysis were used in determining the significant differences among the four groups. The results showed that there was no statistically significant difference among the experimental groups. Generally, students under multimedia instruction performed better than their colleagues in the conventional teaching method. However, students in conventional teaching method had better retention than other groups.

The Five Cs of Digital Curation: Supporting Twenty-First-Century Teaching and Learning

Digital curation is a process that allows university professors to adapt and adopt resources from multidisciplinary fields to meet the educational needs of twenty-first-century learners. Looking through the lens of new media literacy studies (Vasquez, Hartse, & Albers, 2010) and new literacies studies (Gee, 2010), we propose that university professors be savvy consumers of multimedia through purposeful content curation. In this paper, we will discuss practices that university professors may use to transform teaching and learning through effective collection, categorization, critiquing, conceptualization, and circulation of resources deemed to have curricular and content standards value.