Effectiveness of the use of educational software in teaching biology

Abstract

© 2017, FACTEACHEREDUCATION. All Rights Reserved. The paper analyzes comparative effectiveness of the use of educational software and traditional teaching methods in biology instruction for high school students. A random sample consisted of 173 students of grade 12 of a high school in Zrenjanin, Serbia, who were randomly distributed into the control and experimental groups. The students in the experimental group learned biology content (Mechanisms of Heredity) using educational software, whereas the students in the control group learned the same content using the traditional teaching methods. The research was carried out using the pretest-posttest equivalent groups design. All instruments (the pretest, the posttest and the retest) contained the questions belonging to three different cognitive domains: knowing, understanding and reasoning. The analysis of the posttest and the retest results showed that students from the experimental group achieved significantly higher quantity and quality of knowledge in all three cognitive domains than the students from the control group. It can be concluded that educational software has a positive impact on improving students’ achievement in biology teaching.