Senior secondary school students' and teachers' perception of the difficult organic chemistry topics in the Central region

Abstract

This study investigated students’ and teachers’ perceptions of organic chemistry topics in the SSS chemistry syllabus. It compared the perception of students’ with that of their teachers’ with the hope of ascertaining whether perceptions were correlated. The survey method was employed, where questionnaires were administered to 300 chemistry students’ and their 35 teachers. Students’ perception of organic chemistry questionnaire and Teachers’ perception of organic chemistry questionnaire with reliability coefficients of 0.94 and 0.87 respectively were administered to the participants. The sample was drawn from 10 senior secondary schools in the Central Region where students had already treated organic chemistry. Stratified random sampling followed by simple random sampling was used to select 300 students (50 percent male and 50 percent female) from the 10 schools. The study showed that the SSS chemistry students’ perceived 14 out of the 31 organic chemistry topics to be relatively difficult to learn. In the case of the chemistry teachers’, they perceived all the 31 topics to be relatively easy to teach. It was also found that, significant difference existed between male students’ (mean equal to 94.4) and female students’ (mean equal to 100.7) perception of the difficulty level of organic chemistry topics.