Practical Electronics as a Tool for Enhancing Physics Students’ Interest in Learning the Concept of Electricity in Lagos, Nigeria

Abstract

The need to scale-up physics students' interest in learning the concept of electricity at the senior secondary school level has remained a concern for physics educators. This study examined the influence of practical electronics activities as an intervention towards raising the students' interest in learning electricity related topics in physics. A nonexperimental design of causal-comparative research type was adopted while multi-stage sampling procedure was used to select 280 senior secondary III (SS3) physics students from Education District II in Lagos State. A self-developed questionnaire titled "Students Interest Scale on Learning the Concept of Electricity (SIS-LCE)" was administered to capture the demographic profile of the students and their interest in learning the concept of electricity. The ordinal alpha reliability coefficient yielded a value of 0.88. Descriptive statistics of mean and standard deviation were used in the analysis while independent Sample t-test was deployed to test the hypothesis at 0.05 significance level. Findings showed that students who engaged in practical electronics had higher interest in learning the concept of electricity than those who did not. Thus, the author recommends that practical electronics activities should be encouraged among physics students at the secondary school level.