Enhancing Chemistry Students’ Academic Achievement in Delta State: A Comparative Analysis of Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL), Blended Learning, and Conventional Methods

The persistent underperformance of secondary school chemistry students in Nigeria’s public examinations has prompted the need for evidence-based pedagogical innovations. This study examined the differential effects of Process-Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL), Blended Learning, and Conventional Methods on the academic achievement of Senior Secondary II (SS II) chemistry students in Delta State, Nigeria. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest non-equivalent control group design was adopted. The population comprised 29,409 SS II chemistry students enrolled in government-owned secondary schools in Delta State for the 2024/2025 academic session. A purposive, non-randomized sampling technique was used to select 204 students from four secondary schools, distributed across four treatment groups: POGIL (n = 40), Blended Learning (n = 48), Conventional Methods (n = 61), and Control/Revision (n = 55). Data were collected using a Chemistry Achievement Test (CAT), whose reliability was established using Cronbach’s Alpha. Mean scores, standard deviations, and one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) with Scheffe’s post-hoc test were used to analyse the data at a 0.05 significance level. Results revealed that students taught via POGIL (X̅ = 48.13) and Blended Learning (X̅ = 46.92) significantly outscored those in the Conventional Methods group (X̅ = 31.25), with the Control group scoring the lowest (X̅ = 10.65). The ANOVA result was statistically significant (F = 3531.717, p ≤ .05). Scheffe’s post-hoc analysis confirmed that POGIL and Blended Learning were equally effective and superior to Conventional Methods. It was recommended that chemistry teachers adopt POGIL and Blended Learning strategies to enhance student achievement, while educational policymakers should invest in digital infrastructure to sustain blended learning in Nigerian secondary schools.