Examining the Impact of Interactive Multimedia Instruction on the Performance of Secondary School Students in Biology in Dedza District, Malawi

This study examined the impact of teaching biology using interactive multimedia on the students’ academic performance in biology at Community Day Secondary Schools (CDSS). This study was conducted in three secondary schools in the Dedza district, in the central region of Malawi. A pretest-posttest quasi-experimental approach was used in this investigation. A total number of 189 Form Four students were selected from the three schools. The schools were categorized into three groups, namely: (a) urban, (b) rural, and (c) control. The control group received instruction using a teacher-centered approach, while the experimental groups received instruction using interactive multimedia resources. The pretest was conducted for three weeks, after which the posttest was administered. One-way ANOVA in IBM-SPSS software was used to analyse the data. Our findings showed that multimedia instruction packages had a significant impact on student performance (F (2, 188) = 126.557, p < .001). Furthermore, after the intervention, the scores of the rural group and the urban group significantly varied (p < .001). Gender had a significant influence on the performance of students in biology (F (1, 188) = 8.78, p = .003). Therefore, the study concludes that the use of multimedia instructional packages helps learners understand abstract concepts in biology, and the study further recommends that multimedia instructional packages be used to teach hard-to-grasp concepts in biology in CDSS.