Abstract:

Understanding chemical bonding remains a persistent challenge for many secondary school students, particularly low-achieving students. This has prompted science teachers to explore innovative instructional technologies, such as Augmented Reality (AR), to enhance students' learning experiences, attitudes and engagement. This study determined the effectiveness of AR tools on secondary school students’ attitudes and engagement in chemical bonding. Two research questions and three hypotheses guided the study. A one-group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design was adopted, while multistage sampling techniques were used to select 75 senior secondary one (SS1) students from three schools in Aguata Education Zone of Anambra State, Nigeria. The instruments for data collection were the Chemical Bonding Attitude Scale (CBAS) and the Chemical Bonding Engagement Scale (CBES). The instruments were validated by three experts, and reliability coefficients of 0.88 and 0.81 were obtained using Cronbach's alpha for CBAS and CBES, respectively. The data analysis utilised the mean, standard deviation, and paired-samples t-tests. Findings showed that AR significantly improved low-achieving students’ attitude and engagement. The findings also revealed extremely large effect sizes (d = 3.80) and (d = 5.15) of the intervention on students’ attitudes and engagement, respectively. The researchers recommended that the educational stakeholders, teachers and government should make AR tools available in schools and ensure their integration in chemistry instructions, to support low-achieving students and promote inclusivity.

Keywords:

Augmented reality, low achievement, students’ engagement, students' attitude, chemistry, chemical bonding, quasi-experimental design.