Development of expertise in science at basic schools: The effect of first principles of instruction with computer animation and chart and their functional effect on gender

The study was designed to investigate the impact of First Principles of Instruction (FPI) with computer animation and chart, and their functional effect on gender to acquire expertise in science in Junior High School (JHS). The content for the treatments was selected from JHS integrated science syllabus. The contents of the instructional media were designed in line with the specifications of Principles of Multimedia Learning (PML). All the learning tasks for the two treatments were designed based on FPI. Eighty- seven second-year JHS students (male = 48, female = 39) with a mean age of 14.4 years were randomly assigned to the two treatments. Ateacher was trained to deliver the content. The main study consisted of three sessions, which were delivered in the regular classroom and computer laboratory. Paired-sample and independent t-tests and univariate analyses were used to analyze the data. The result showed that there was no statistically significant difference between the two treatments. In addition, the result revealed no significant interaction effect on gender and the two treatments for the acquisition of expertise in science at the basic school. The findings are novel and suggest that static/inexpensive instructional media (e.g.chart) carefully designed with specifications of PML integrated withFPI is equally effective as dynamic instructional media (e.g., computer animation) for the development of expertise in science in the context of traditional classrooms of basic schools irrespective of the gender of the students.