Okeke, Ramaila and Ukoh, 2023.pdfEffects of Cognitively Guided Instruction on Senior Secondary School Students’ Attitude towards PhysicsDecolonizing secondary school science education through contextualized instruction: An exploration of the nature o

n an effort to achieve educational goals and improve students' enthusiasm for Physics, it is important to take into account the prior experiences that students bring with them to the classroom. Teachers' exploration of these prior experiences is crucial when implementing the constructivist approach to classroom instruction, as it helps in achieving the desired objectives. Consequently, this research aimed to investigate how the application of cognitively guided instruction influences the attitudes of senior secondary school students towards Physics. The study employed a pretest-posttest control group quasi-experimental design and utilized multilevel linear models for data analysis, considering the hierarchical structure of the data with participants nested at both classroom and school levels. Students’ Attitude to Physics Questionnaire was used to collect data during the study. The study's findings revealed a significant positive impact of cognitively guided instructional strategy (CGIS) on students' attitudes towards Physics, and a significant difference in the post-attitude mean scores of students in the CGIS and the conventional teacher-centred instructional groups. Thus, cognitively guided instruction holds substantial promise as an effective pedagogical strategy for teaching Physics. In conclusion, this research underscores the importance of contextualizing instruction, as it actively engages students in the learning process and significantly enhances their attitudes towards the subject of Physics. The instructional structure which CGIS provides enables the validation of students’ knowledge-creation ability <br> In the developing world, particularly in Africa, physics teachers face the challenge of facilitating the acquisition of scientifically relevant knowledge that aligns with the learners’ social and cultural context. This position paper, situated within the ongoing discourse on the decolonization of the African education system, examined how physics pedagogy, which is a vital part of secondary school science education, could be decolonized by inte­ grating Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) which the students encounter in their daily out-of-classroom ex­ periences, and which is a constituent of their prior experiences of informal knowledge of the subject. The integrative methodology for the review of literature was adopted to examine and comprehend knowledge decolonization within the classroom and the necessary expertise required to achieve such objective. The emphasis of decolonization in this article lays in the promotion of IKS, acknowledgment and integration of students’ prior informal experiences of the physical sciences. This is underscored by the necessity to integrate both vertical and horizontal structures of knowledge conceptualization. The article examined the potential of contextual approach to instruction, and adaptive expertise as a potent skill for the achievement of knowledge integration. Adaptive expertise is identified as an essential skill to navigate the challenges of contemporary science and science education. To achieve knowledge integration, the paper proposes a contextualized inquiry approach as a suitable technique <br>