Effect of reciprocal teaching strategy on students’ academic performance in genetics: A quasi-experimental study

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the Reciprocal Teaching Strategy (RTS) on Senior High School students’ academic performance in genetics in the Sekyere South District of the Ashanti Region, Ghana. The study adopted a quantitative approach using a quasi-experimental non-equivalent control group pretest–posttest design. A total of 121 SHS 3 biology students participated in the study, comprising 70 students in the experimental group and 51 students in the control group. The experimental group received instruction using the Reciprocal Teaching Strategy, whereas the control group was taught using the Conventional Teaching Method. Data were collected using the Students’ Performance in Genetics (SPG) test, which served as both the pretest and posttest. Independent-samples and paired-samples t-tests were employed to analyze the data at a 0.05 level of significance. The findings revealed no statistically significant difference in pretest scores between the experimental and control groups, indicating comparable prior knowledge before the intervention. However, the posttest results showed a statistically significant difference in favour of the experimental group, with students taught using the Reciprocal Teaching Strategy achieving higher academic performance than those taught using the Conventional Teaching Method. The paired-samples t-test further demonstrated a significant improvement in the experimental group’s posttest performance, with a large effect size, indicating that RTS had a substantial positive impact on students’ achievement in genetics. The study concludes that the Reciprocal Teaching Strategy is an effective instructional approach for improving students’ understanding of genetics and recommends that the Ghana Education Service and biology teachers integrate RTS into classroom instruction and teacher professional development programmes to enhance learning outcomes in genetics and other conceptually challenging science topics.