Cooperative Mastery Learning as an Instructional Strategy for Sustaining Students' Retention of learned content in Biology

Abstract

The study investigated Cooperative Mastery Learning as an Instructional Strategy for sustaining students’ retention of learned content in Biology in Lagos State secondary schools, Nigeria. The research design adopted Solomon’s four groups, a non-randomised pre-test, post-test, control group quasi-experimental design. The population comprised all senior secondary 2 students offering biology in public senior secondary schools, Lagos State. The sample comprised one hundred and sixty-three (163) senior secondary 2 students offering biology, drawn from four selected public senior secondary schools in Educational District II in Lagos State. Modified Biology Achievement Test (BAT) with a 0.90 reliability index was used for data collection. The result showed a significant effect of the instructional strategy on students’ retention in senior secondary biology F(3, 147) = 21.653, p < 0.05). However, result showed no significant effect of peer relations on students’ retention of Biology content (F(1, 150) = 0.562, p > 0.05). In addition, the interaction effect of instructional strategy and peer relation was not significant on the students’ retention of Biology content (F(3, 147) = 1.057, p > 0.05). The study hence concluded that cooperative mastery learning led to students’ knowledge retention in biology, and it 55.3% of the variance in students’ retention scores. It was recommended that teachers should adopt the use of cooperative mastery learning to improve students’ retention in Biology