A Guided-Discovery Approach to Problem Solving: An Explicit Instruction

Abstract

In the quest to maximize students’ academic growth, one of the best tools available to educators is explicit instruction, a structured, systematic, and effective methodology for teaching academic skills that facilitates important instructional interactions between teachers and students. This quasi-experimental matching only pretest-posttest control group design of research aimed to determine the effectiveness of explicit instruction on students’ mathematics achievement and problem-solving skills. This involved 40 Grade 11 Senior High School students as participants. One group of students was taught using explicit instruction and the other group used the traditional instruction. The statistical tools used to determine the effectiveness of the instruction in the lessons presented were mean, mean gain, independent t-test, and Wilcoxon Signed Rank test. Results showed that explicit instruction had significantly increased students’ performance in mathematics achievement and problem-solving skills. Both traditional and explicit instructions had effectively changed the scores of the students from the pretest to the post-test performance in mathematics achievement and problem-solving skills. Also, explicit instruction showed a significantly higher value of mean gain scores than the traditional instruction in mathematics achievement and problem-solving skills.