Validation and Acceptability of a Guidebook in Writing Investigatory Projects

The guidebook in writing investigatory projects is an instructional material used by high school students in preparing a science research paper. The guidebook was subjected to validation and acceptability test by students and experts. The developmental research method, experimental research design in evaluating the developed guidebook and descriptive- evaluative design in the acceptability test of the developed guidebook was utilized in the study. Using a questionnaire checklist, experts and the student users rated the acceptability of the developed guidebook in terms of contents, clarity, appeal to target users, originality, learning activities, applicability/usefulness and format. Findings of this study revealed that students from the exposed and not exposed groups significantly improved their performance based on pretest and posttest. Moreover, students exposed to the developed guidebook achieved a higher mean score in the posttest than the not exposed group. The result of the dependent t- test revealed that there is a significant difference between the pretest and posttest results of the exposed and not exposed groups to the developed guidebook. The developed guidebook was very much accepted in terms of content, clarity, appeal to target user, originality, learning activities, applicability or usefulness and format as evaluated by the two groups of evaluators. The independent t- test revealed that there was no significant difference between the evaluation of the student respondents and experts. The use of the developed guidebook significantly increased the performance of the students. Therefore, the developed Guidebook in Writing Investigatory Projects can be used as an effective instructional material for writing science investigatory projects.