The Effect of Clare's Plan on Female Students' Achievement in the History Subject in the Institute of Teachers' Preparation

Abstract

Teaching through the system of personal learning, known as (Clare's plan) is amongst the most prominent plans which depend on self-education, as it received worldwide recognition. The plan lets the learner achieve learning by depending on himself after being familiar with the educational goals given to him, then he starts to solve the exercises and the drills accompanying the unit. After that, he checks his achievement by answering the self-evaluation tests. This method offers more opportunities for personal interaction than do the traditional systems, and individual leaning is a methodical expression aims at taking care of the learner and making him the locus of the processes of teaching and learning.

Aims of the study: the effect of Clare's plan on the achievement of female students in the history subject in the institute of teachers' preparation.

Hypothesis of the study: There is no significant statistical difference at 0.05 level of indication between the mean score of female students who study by using Clare's plan and those who study using the usual (traditional) method in achievement.

Limits of the study: the current study is limited to female students in daytime institutes of teachers' preparation in Baghdad Province/the center.

Terminology: Clare's Plan, achievement, history

Chapter two: previous studies that dealt with (Clare's plan with achievement).

Chapter three:

First: experimental design: the researcher adopted an experimental design of two groups: experimental and control, and an achievement post-test.

Second: female students of institute of teachers' preparation / daytime in Baghdad City, the center / the academic year 2011-2012

Third: class A represented the experimental group, while class B represented the control group.

The researcher equalized the variables (scores in the history subject and intelligence test).

The researcher formulated (30) behavioural goals depending on the general aims and the content of the history topics that were going to be taught during the experiment divided on the first three levels in the cognitive zone of Bloom's classification (knowledge, comprehension, application).

The researcher prepared a test to measure achievement, consisting of (30) multiple-choice items. The researcher used a number of statistical tools among which (single variance analysis, item difficulty and item discrimination formula, person correlation coefficient, Spearman-Brown formula).

Chapter four: the researcher presents in this chapter the results that she has reached in pursuant with the aim of the study (the hypothesis of the study was rejected and the results showed that there was statistically significant difference between the scores of the two groups).

Conclusions

In the light of the results that the current study has reached, the following can be concluded:

• Female students of the institute of teachers' preparation are in need of using untraditional teaching techniques, including Clare's plan.
• Using Clare's model leads to better learning achievement.

Recommendations 

• History teachers should be familiar with Clare's plan and its steps in order to use it in teaching history.
• Training elementary and secondary school teachers in the course of preparing them in the institutes of teachers' preparation.

Suggestions

In order to follow up the current study, the researcher suggests conducting the following studies:

• Conducting a study to compare Clare's plan with other self-learning techniques (like programmed learning and educational case)