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Science EducationESUT · Faculty of Education
Research ArticleOpen Access

Enhancing the Understanding of Biology Students on 'how' and 'why' Biological Phenomena Occur through Causal Reasoning

Peace A. Eze1*

  1. 1Department of Science Education, Enugu State University of Science and Technology (ESUT), Enugu, Nigeria

* Corresponding author: Peace A. Eze

Abstract

Cause and effect of biological phenomena seem to remain ambiguous to most people, including biology students. Understanding the concept of biological phenomena requires proper articulation of biological concepts and scientific reasoning. This study on enhancing the understanding of biology students on how and why biological phenomena occur through causal reasoning was carried out in Enugu North local government area of Enugu State, Nigeria. The population of the study was 4,612 biology students in Enugu North local government area. The sample size was thirty (30) biology students. This was made up of one (1) male and one (1) female, biology student that were sampled through simple random sampling, by balloting, from each of the three senior secondary school classes of five public co-education schools in Enugu North local government areas. Pre-teaching and post-teaching of causal reasoning interviews were conducted on the students to determine the impact of teaching causal reasoning to the students. Data collected from their interview responses prior to the teaching and after the teaching of causal reasoning about biological phenomena were analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and subjected to Chi-Square test at 0.05 level of significance, to determine the impact of the teaching on their understanding of how and why biological phenomena occur. The Chi-Square test result indicated that there was significant association between causal reasoning with enhancement of the understanding of biology students on how and why biological phenomena occur. It was, therefore, recommended that teaching towards understanding how and why biological phenomena occurred, should be approached through scientific reasoning, by the teachers. Biology teachers should teach their students on how to think analytically and scientifically in order to understand and interpret biological phenomena.

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Publication history

Published
1 July 2024

Copyright & licence. © 2024 the author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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