The Effect of the Use of Interactive Notebooks on 9th Grade Student Achievement

Abstract

There is an increasing push for improvement in the academic performance of students across the nation. Researchers have shown that one way to achieve this is to help students become more organized in their gathering and reviewing of information. This study was done to determine whether using interactive notebooks would impact organization enough to increase the academic achievement of 9th grade students studying Biology. The null hypothesis was that there would be no difference in achievement between the students using interactive notebooks and those who did not. A pretest-posttest comparison was used to test the effectiveness of the interactive notebooks. Although both groups of students showed improvement after the quarterly exam was issued, the students who used the interactive notebooks throughout the quarter received higher scores and showed more improvement between their pretest and posttest data causing the null hypothesis to be rejected. This study therefore supported the use of interactive notebooks as a tool to help improve organization thus student achievement.