Evaluating the Effectiveness of the Learn-before-Lecture Approach on Biodiversity Education for Pre-University Students

Biodiversity conservation is dependent on human knowledge and understanding of nature and society. Conventional teaching created a formalism in students’ interpretations of biodiversity. This study evaluated the effectiveness of a Learn-before-Lecture (LBL) approach through pre-lecture activities on biodiversity topics among pre-university students. A total of 80 pre-university students were randomly assigned to the Treatment Group (TG) and the Control Group (CG). Pre-lecture interventions included organizing materials and activities for TG a week before the scheduled lecture class, while CG followed the conventional teaching method. Both groups completed pre- and post-test quizzes for evaluations. The result reported that while both groups showed improvements from pre-test to post-test, the post-test mean score of the CG (13.16) was significantly higher than the TG (10.77). Statistical analysis confirmed a significant difference in post-test performance between the two groups, favouring the CG. This suggests that the CG outperformed the TG after the LBL intervention. The questions distributed to students were observed with excellent difficulty (53.125±5.473) and a fair discriminative index (0.296±0.049). These results show that the LBL method, as implemented in this study, did not enhance student performance compared to conventional teaching. Hence, the findings suggest that although the LBL approach is pedagogically promising, it may require improved design with better integration, support mechanisms, or motivational components to be effective in pre-university biodiversity education.