Enhancing the Interest of Senior Secondary Students in Herbal Drug Discovery Using Guided Inquiry Instructional Strategy

This study investigated the effectiveness of the Guided Inquiry Instructional Strategy (GIIS) in enhancing the interest of Senior Secondary Students in herbal drug discovery in the Kabba-Bunu Education Zone of Kogi State, Nigeria. The increasing global reliance on herbal medicine, particularly in African societies, emphasize the need to integrate indigenous knowledge systems into formal science education. However, a major challenge facing science educators is the declining interest of students in pharmacognosy-related topics due to traditional, teacher-centered instructional methods. This quasi-experimental research employed a pre-test post-test non-equivalent control group design. Two groups of SS2 students were purposively selected from two comparable schools in the Kabba-Bunu education zone. The experimental group was taught using the GIIS approach, which actively involved students in identifying, classifying, and analyzing local medicinal plants through guided questioning, hands-on activities, and collaborative learning, while the control group received conventional teaching method. An Interest Inventory Questionnaire on Herbal Drug Discovery (IIQ-HDD) was developed and validated to measure students’ interest before and after the intervention. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics of mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions and ANCOVA for testing the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings revealed a statistically significant improvement in the interest level of students exposed to GIIS compared to those taught with conventional method (p < 0.05). The study concluded that GIIS is an effective pedagogical approach for promoting interest in herbal drug discovery among secondary school students. It recommends the adoption of guided inquiry strategy in science classrooms and the incorporation of indigenous medicinal knowledge into the Nigerian secondary school curriculum to foster relevance, innovation, and engagement in science education.