ICT INTEGRATION IN SECONDARY SCHOOL PHYSICS AND ITS EFFECT ON STUDENTS’ PHYSICS ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IN MOMBASA COUNTY, KENYA

Abstract

In the past years, the Kenya Government and other organisations have heavily invested in ICT facilities in public secondary schools. This was aimed at enhancing pedagogical approaches required for education. This study was aimed at, [1] investigating how far ICT has been integrated in secondary school Physics Education, [2] to find the effect of using ICT on students’ academic performance in Physics and 3] to identify the challenges faced by Physics teachers in using ICT with the aim of finding possible solutions. In order to achieve this, questionnaires were administered to 148 secondary school Physics teachers in Mombasa County, Kenya. Three (3) ICT champions in the county were also interviewed. To investigate how teaching using ICT affects students’ academic performance in Physics, an experiment was conducted involving one Physics teacher and 143 Form Two Physics students in a purposively selected Secondary School. The experimental data was analysed using the two-way ANOVA. The SPSS computer software (version 20) was used to analyse quantitative data obtained from the Likert Scale items while the qualitative data was analysed using Bryman’s Four Stage Qualitative Analysis. From the study, teachers using ICT in teaching Physics were the majority (58.2%). This was contrary to the findings by CEMASTEA (2014) which showed that only few teachers used ICT in their teaching. The finding also showed that teaching using ICT improved students academic performance. This agreed with Adeyemo (2010) whose study showed that students’ performance in Physics was higher for those who were taught using ICT tools. Among the highly rated challenges in using ICT were inadequate ICT resources, inadequate skills and inadequate time for preparation. Among the recommendations given were to avail better quality ICT resources to schools, to train teachers on ICT use at college level, to recruit more science teachers to ease the teaching work load among others. The findings of this study were expected to contribute positively towards ICT integration in secondary school Physics Education hence improving the academic performance in