Assessing Secondary School Students’ Understandings of Biological Prefixes and Suffixes in Kakata Educational District, Margibi County, Liberia

Understanding biological prefixes and suffixes is paramount for any student who opts to follow a career path leading to any of the branches of biology. Understanding and spelling biology terminologies is a serious challenge for many secondary school students, which leads them to the conclusion that studying biology is difficult, causing many secondary school students to shy away from studying biology at tertiary institutions. The population sampled for the study was one hundred senior secondary students in the Kakata Educational District of Margibi County. The study lasted for two months. The methodology employed for the study was a descriptive survey design. The objectives of this study were: a) To assess students’ understanding of common prefixes and suffixes of biological terminologies, b) To assess students’ abilities in identifying the correct prefixes and suffixes from biological terminologies. The study’s findings established that the majority of the students did not understand and struggled with writing the correct or acceptable meanings of biological prefixes and suffixes. Furthermore, the study’s findings indicated that 63-99% of students wrote the wrong or incorrect meanings of biological prefixes and suffixes, while less than 38% correctly wrote (understood) the acceptable meanings of biological prefixes and suffixes. However, 54%-87% of students could identify and write both correct or acceptable biological prefixes and suffixes only. The study recommends that biology teachers develop teaching strategies-specifically teaching biological morphemes to enhance students’ understandings of biological terminologies, by decoding them into prefixes and suffixes, to enhancing students’ abilities to form plural and singular forms of biological terms, and in addition, to enhance student’s ability in forming plural and singular forms of biological terminologies as well as helping students read aloud to become familiar and fluent in pronouncing biological terminologies.