Effect of Crossword Games in STEM Subjects on Students’ Academic Performance of selected Secondary Schools in Osun State, Nigeria

Abstract

The Study developed a crossword puzzle and compared the effect of both traditional classroom teaching and the crossword game on Students' academic performance in STEM subjects The research entailed the building of a cutting-edge Natural Language Processing environment for the creation of a web-based crossword puzzle game. The study adopted the quasi-experimental research design. The study's population included one thousand seven hundred and forty (1440) Senior Secondary One (SS1) scientific subject students from all 16 public secondary schools in the study area. The sample size consisted of 156 SS1 Science students selected from two co-educational secondary schools and at each of the selected schools, a simple random sample procedure was applied. The instrument utilised for data collection was the STEM Science Achievement Test (SSAT), which was validated by specialists in STEM fields. A reliability coefficient of 0.72 for the Kuder- Richardson Formula 20 (KR) was created. To address research questions, data were analyzed using mean and standard deviation, and hypotheses were tested using Analysis of Covariance at the.05 level of significance. Students taught the notion of Biology, Chemistry, and Physics using crossword puzzle teaching approach outperformed those taught using traditional classroom teaching strategy with a mean gain performance score (8.7) to (5.6). The Study concluded that, the crossword puzzle teaching technique improves students' understanding and, as a result, greater academic performance on the notion of STEM subject as well as students' (gamers') comprehension skills in STEMrelated themes. It is suggested, among other things, that STEM-based topic teachers

use a crossword puzzle teaching technique. Keywords:

STEM Education, Digital Games, Crossword games, Academic Performance