ABSTRACT
The purpose of this work is to investigate the effect of discovery method on academic performance of senior secondary school student’s in Biology in Yakurr Local Government Area, Cross River State. To carry out this study two research questions and two null hypotheses were formulated, a literature review related to the study was conducted. A pre-test, post- test, quasi experimental design was used to carry out this study, simple random sampling was used to select 2 co- educational government owned secondary schools in Yakurr Local Government Area that were used as experimental and control groups in the study. A Biology Achievement Test (BAT) developed by the researcher was used for data collection. The instrument underwent face and content validity and reliability using a Test retest reliability table established at 0.64. Mean and Standard Deviation were used to answer the research questions and the hypotheses were tested at 0.05 using the independent t-test at 98 degree of freedom and 49 degree of freedom. The result of the findings revealed that students taught biology using discovery method performed better than those taught using conventional method and the findings also revealed that the is no significant difference between male and female students taught biology using discovery method. The following recommendations were made based on the study: Biology teachers should be encouraged to adopt discovery method of teaching while planning a biology class or lesson, Female and male students should be given equal chance to act and interact with the teacher during classes, students should be exposed to factors that will enable the discover more ideas by themselves during biology lessons.
