EFFECT OF VIRTUAL CHEMISTRY LABORATORY SOFWARE (VCLS) ON SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENT IN ACID-BASE TITRATIONS EXPERIMENT

Poor funding, high cost of maintaining standard chemistry laboratory compared to the virtual laboratory software, fragile and expensive apparatuses and costly reagent necessitated the need to determine the effect of Virtual Chemistry Laboratory Software (VCLS) on Lagos State secondary school chemistry students’ achievement during acid-base titrations experiment. The influence of gender was also examined. Four null hypotheses guided the study .It was a quasi-experimental research design of 2x2x2 nonrandomized factorial matrix with a sample of 164 (104 females and 60 males) and average age of 14 years participated in the study. Three research instruments were used for data collection. Data were analysed using two-ways ANOVA. The results show a significant effect of Virtual Chemistry Laboratory Software (VCLS) over the Conventional Chemistry Laboratory (CCL) on secondary school chemistry students’ achievement during acid-base titrations experiment such that the female students slightly performed better than the males in both the VCLS and CCL. There was also slight interaction effects of VCLS and gender on chemistry students’ achievement during acid-base titrations experiment but there was no influence of school type during acidbase titrations experiment. The study concludes that there will be need to expose all students to VCLS and this may remove stress, provide students with adaptive challenge, curiosity, immediate feedback, competition, discovery, clear objectives and self-expression. The study suggests that the examining bodies like National Examinations Council (NECO) and West Africa Examination Council (WAEC) should introduce VCLS in all their internal and external examinations which is economical and saves student from endangering themselves with hazardous chemicals like Con. H2SO4.