Development and Testing of a Learning Package for College Botany using Local Geography

Abstract

This study was an attempt to examine the potential of local geography to teach botany as a socioscience. This was done initially through the development of a geographic learning package (GLP) for plant taxonomy and ecology as the medium for socioscientific teaching and second, in the testing for the significant effect of a socioscientific approach of teaching botany using GLP (SATGLP) to second year college students' learning performance and attitudes. Printed and non-printed documents of Davao Oriental geography, instructor-assembled standardized test questions for student learning performance and attitude scale for student attitudes, and expert judgment, classroom try-out of student responses for the validity and reliability of the learning package were used as instruments in the study. The 42 students in both control and experimental classes were found comparable in age, existing knowledge and acquired attitudes in science. One biology instructor taught both classes in the third quarter of the second semester, November – March 1999. Mean judgment ratings on the validity of the development of GLP indicated that it was more than satisfactory. It was able to use three main geographic elements: the physical features, natural resources and the socio-cultural characteristics of Davao Oriental for motivating, problem situation, and in contextualizing exercises and examples. On the other hand, t-test means showed that SATGLP is significantly different from the control only in the mean gain scores of the learning performance of students. The attitudes were significantly different only in the pretest scores of students.