Students' Misconception in Science at Secondary Level: A Quest of Exploration

Abstract

This study entitled "Students' Misconception in Science at Secondary Level: A Quest of Exploration" was carried out with the aim of determining prevalent or dominant misconceptions in science among secondary level students and compare the results with different variable. Both Quan-qual research design of has been adopted. The population of the study was all the secondary schools from Tanahun district. Purposive sampling technique was used to select the schools from the defined population. The selected schools were more convenient for the researcher as they were near the researcher's home. The highest number of students with misconception was found in chemistry followed by physics and biology. Most of the students had chosen their source of answer from their own intrinsic knowledge. Furthermore, it examined whether the number of students having misconception in those questions were related with gender and the type of school they study. The comparison of number of misconception with gender in different disciplines of science suggested that there is no significant difference between those variables. On the other hand, comparison of number of misconception with type of school showed that there was significant difference between the community school students' and private school students' misconception. In addition, the correlation of the students' misconception in different disciplines of science revealed that the correlation between physics and chemistry were very small while chemistry and biology were at medium level and the correlation between biology and physics were negligible. The findings of this study can be used by science teachers in designing classroom activities and teaching strategies that could address the students' misconception. It will provide 9 some suggestions to the educational practitioners to adopt new strategies to avoid misconceptions and increase the probability of high achievement of students.