Abstract

• The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of active learning instructional strategies on the academic achievement and basic science process skills of science students at the middle school level. Science process skills are central to the acquisition of scientific knowledge and enable students experience hands-on engagement with science materials when solving problems using practical approaches. These skills can be developed by using active learning instructional strategies in the science classroom because the aim of these strategies is skills development rather than just conveying information: students engage in activities to promote higher order thinking. Therefore, to investigate the effectiveness, nonequivalent control group research design was used. Two townships, one high school from each, were randomly selected from four districts in Yangon Region. Two classrooms from Grade Six were randomly selected and assigned to control and experimental groups in each selected school. A pretest, a posttest and an attitude questionnaire were used. A t test for independent samples and an analysis of covariance were used to find the difference in the science achievement and basic science process skills between the students who received active learning instructional strategies and those who did not. According to the results, there were significant differences between the two groups in basic science process skills in one of the selected schools. In another school, although there were significant differences between the two groups in communicating, classifying and inferring skills, there was no significant difference in observing, measuring and predicting skills. Moreover, there were significant differences in science achievement between the two groups in both schools. Therefore, it was found that using active learning instructional strategies in teaching science had significant improvement in the academic achievement and basic science process skills of the students, and it developed positive attitudes towards learning science.