Melbourne Graduate School of Education - Theses

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    Effects of inquiry and expository experimental treatments upon student achievement in geography
    Berry, Robin Vernon ( 1983)
    The experimental study investigated the effects upon students' Inquiry Skills achievement scores of firstly, exposure to 'a set of geography resource materials; secondly, the application of three different experimental treatments; and thirdly, the students' sex. The sample used in the experimental study consisted of 404 Year 10 geography students in nine Melbourne high schools. Classes in each school were randomly assigned to either a control group which had no exposure to any of the resource materials or to one of three experimental treatments, namely an expository treatment, a teacher controlled inquiry treatment and a student controlled inquiry treatment. Half the students in the' sample completed an Inquiry Skills pretest so that statistical adjustments could be made for prior inquiry skills aptitude. All students completed a posttest after the completion of a four week geography unit of work. A series of multivariate analyses of variance and univariate analyses of covariance were undertaken to test seven research hypotheses. The major findings of the study were firstly that students exposed to the geography resource materials performed significantly better (p< .05) than the control group; secondly, no significant differences (p< .05) were observed between the three experimental treatments or between male and female students in these experimental treatments; and thirdly, that students in the experimental treatment group experienced a training effect on the Data Gathering element of the Inquiry Skills test as a consequence of completing a pretest.