RELATIVE ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS PERCEPTION OF DIFFICULT CONCEPTS IN BIOLOGY AMONG SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOLS IN KAURA, KADUNA STATE, NIGERIA

The study investigated the students’ perception of difficult concepts in biology among senior secondary schools in Kaura, Nigeria. The study was guided by three research questions and one hypothesis. The research design was descriptive survey design. Population of the study was all the senior secondary school biology students in Kaura Local Government Area with 2550 senior secondary school students, from which 1387 SSII biology students from three senior secondary school in the study area was selected as sample, using Krejcie and Morgan (1970). The instrument for data collection in this study was Students’ Perception of Difficult Concepts in Biology Questionnaire (SPDCBQ), with a reliability coefficient of 0.76. The data gathered was analyzed using simple percentage, mean score and standard deviation for the research questions, while the null hypothesis was tested using t-test statistics. Findings revealed that some topics (Mendelian genetics, nervous system, reproduction, homeostasis, genes and chromosomes) proved to be more difficult to the students than other topics. Also, the perception of difficulty of concepts in biology is controlled by gender. From the findings, it was recommended that there is a need to make the subject content of senior secondary school biology curriculum more current, meaningful and interesting for the students, reflecting the current developments in the field and relating teaching-learning process with daily life issues. The study concluded that the students perceived some topics as more difficult than others in Biology and gender has a significant difference on students’ perception of difficult Biology topics.