Meta-analysis of effectiveness of pedagogical innovations involving technology in organic chemistry education in developing students’ academic performance

Abstract

Because organic chemistry asks students to use visual and spatial thinking skills (e.g., three-dimensional structures of molecules) and comprehend various chemical reactions and mechanisms, it naturally needs pedagogical innovations involving technology to result in better academic performance. However, none of the previous studies has investigated the extent to which these pedagogical innovations are effective in improving students’ academic performance of organic chemistry education. This study aims to meta-analytically assess the effectiveness of the pedagogical innovations involving technology in organic chemistry education in developing students’ academic performance. The current meta-analysis handled 26 studies as the corpus of the data retrieved from the database and manual search. The authors initially coded the studies via a template form and inserted all statistical data from a Microsoft Excel sheet into Comprehensive Meta-Analysis (CMA V2) statistics software to calculate Hedges’ g for the corpus data. The findings pointed to the large effect for the overall effect size (g = 0.973). Also, it was found that only subgroups for the use of technological tools within the moderator variable “type of pedagogical innovations involving technology” played a significant role at predicting the students’ academic performance as a result of the treatments. In light of the findings, it can be inferred that the pedagogical innovations involving technology in organic chemistry education are more effective and fruitful in developing the students’ academic performance than nontechnology-based control groups. Further, the current meta-analysis study concludes that high school (for educational level), flipped classroom (for the pedagogical models including technology), digital media (for the use of technological tools), and short-term treatment (for implementation duration) act as the most effective variables to learn organic chemistry via the pedagogical innovations. Future research should focus on other individual and moderator variables to offer more adaptive alternatives for the use of chemistry teachers and lecturers.