ABSTRACT
The study investigated the Effects of field- trip on Retention and Academic Achievement in Ecology among Secondary School Students in Zaria, Nigeria. An experimental design which utilized Pre-test-Post-test Control Group design was adopted. The population of the study consisted of 2934 SS1 students from nineteen (19) public schools in Zaria Educational Zone of Kaduna State. Four (4) out of nineteen schools were randomly selected from both urban and rural areas where two schools each were used as experimental and control groups respectively. The experimental group was taught using field trip teaching strategy while the control group was taught by lecture method. A stratified random sampling technique was employed to select the sample from the four schools and a total of 200 students were selected as sample size from both urban and rural areas. The instruments used for this study were Ecology Achievement Test (EAT) with reliability value 0.83 and Ecology Retention Test (ERT) with reliability value 0.85 aimed at determining the achievement and retention of the students. Four research questions were stated such as what is the effect of field trip teaching strategy on students' academic achievement in ecology concept in Zaria educational Zone? And four corresponding hypotheses such as there is no significant difference between the mean scores of the students taught ecology concept using field trip and those taught using lecture method were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. After the data were collected; the research questions were tested with descriptive statistics such as mean and standard deviation and the hypotheses were tested using inferential statistics i.e independent sample test (t-test). The finding of the study showed that the field trip teaching strategy favoured the experimental group in ecology concept. The study further confirmed that field trip teaching strategy favoured urban experimental group. One of the major recommendations made is that Government should make the use of field trip teaching strategy compulsory particularly in the teaching and learning of ecology concept at senior secondary school level.