PRACTICE OF ACTIVE LEARNING METHOD IN CASE OF DIMTU SECONDARY SCHOOL,THAT FOUN IN JIMMA ZONE,TIRO AFETA WORADA

Abstract

The main purpose of this study was the practices of active learning approaches in Dimtu Secondary School .To meet the objective of the study; a convergent parallel mixed design was employed. Lottery method was used to select the section from which students were sampled. The director of the school, 9 teachers and all 80 students from grade 9-12th were selected using availability sampling technique. The Sampling Technique that used in this study was simple random sampling(SRS).The reason the researcher prefer the SRS Technique was due to: each number of population under the study was have an equal chance to be selected, the probability of the member of the population that selected was not affect by selection of other member with in the population and each selection was completely independent of the next when drawing out the name or code that represent each number in the entire population. Quantitative data were collected from all students and teachers using structured and pretested questionnaire. The academic director and selected teachers were interviewed using interview guide. Data analysis was done in three phases. First, analysis of the quantitative data was done in SPSS and percentages, and frequencies were used. Second, qualitative data was analyzed considering the research questions, using framework coding which is a deductive approach. Finally, quantitative and qualitative results were merged. Almost all teachers and students had a positive perception of active learning. Teachers are practicing active learning sometimes but the level of their practice was not satisfactory. Lecture was found to be the most commonly employed teaching technique followed by individual assignments, group work/discussion and question and answer methods. Shortage of time, large amount of contents to be covered during one classroom and lecturers and students tendency towards the traditional lecture method were found to be the most serious factors among the problems that affects the practice of active learning negatively. It has been recommended that teachers should be committed to discharge their roles to exercise active learning methodologies. Additionally, to improve the level of active learning, the administration of the school should continuously identify and solve those problems by developing a working group in coordination with teachers, students and other stakeholders