Abstract

• The main purpose of the study is to investigate the effect of hands-on activities on the achievement of grade ten biology students. Specially, this study aims to compare biology achievement between students who receive instruction with hands-on activities and those who receive instruction without hands-on activities. The design adopted in this study was posttestonly control group design which is one of the true experimental designs. Two basic education high Schools, No.1, BEHS, Taungdwingyi and No.3, BEHS, Taungdwingyi were selected. A sample of (120) grade ten biology students was used in this study. Posttest was constructed based on the content area of Chapter (5), A Variety of Living Organisms: A Bony Fish. Treatments were conducted separately to two groups. The experimental groups were taught with hands-on activities and the control groups were taught without hands-on activities. Independent samples t test was used to analyse the data. The results showed that the performance of students who were taught with hands-on activities was significantly better than that of students who were taught without hands-on activities at knowledge, comprehension and application levels and on overall posttest achievement scores. Therefore, the findings indicated that the use of hands-on activities has significant effect on the achievement of students in teaching biology.