The Influence of the mode of delivery on upper secondary students' performance in Biology, Kawempe Division

Abstract

Biology subject has been poorly performed at upper secondary level country wide in Uganda: UNEB results of consecutive years indicate that the subject is always the worst done with very few grades A and B. This study assessed the influence of mode of delivery on the performance of Biology at upper secondary level in Kawempe division. The researchers sorted and selected variables related to the study from the data and analyzed it using descriptive statistics of STATA program. Among the respondents, the majority were males 24(80%) and most of them were undergraduate teachers 26 (86.67%) followed by 1(3.33%) holding masters and diploma 2 (6.57%). The dependent variable in the study was academic performance conceptualized in terms of grades from grade A to grade F, the academic performance in biology was collected for the last four years from 2017 to 2020. The results obtained from the study show that all the different modes of delivery used by teachers in Kawempe division do not affect the performance of UACE biology since the correlation between all the modes of delivery in the study and the biology performance was insignificant (P> 0.05). However, for the interpretation of the coefficients, indicates that those who frequently use the project based learning (0.6516228), brainstorming (3.304288), discussion (1.890544), storytelling (5.520106) and role playing (0.285975) are likely to achieve better performances in biology compared to those who do not use them frequently and other modes like problem-based learning (-0.220607), guided group discussion (-0.6810154) and demonstrations (-7.79435) This study, therefore, concludes that modes of delivery used by biology teachers in Kawempe are not the course of the consistently poor performance in A „Level biology in Kawempe division and that other factors like teachers‟ motivation and learners‟ efforts and attitudes could be responsible. We recommend that biology teachers are constantly supervised by school administrators to ensure they conduct lessons as expected. The learners should continuously be counseled and guided.