Biology Education in the Context of HIV/AIDS: A Step Towards Education for Sustainable Development (ESD)

Abstract

This paper describes the HIV/AIDS Preventive Education that was implemented in September 2009 amongst 56 Semester-5 student teachers at Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI). The main purpose of this project is to build capacity in terms of HIV/AIDS knowledge among secondary school student teachers with the hope that, not only would they be aware and able to take the necessary steps to reduce HIV infection, but also to multiply the effect when they serve as trained science teachers. Given the purpose and the exploratory nature of this research project, a mixed-methodology design was employed: one-group pretest-posttest design which involved a single group that was pretested, exposed to the HIV/AIDS Preventive Education that judiciously appropriated the principled Five- Phase Constructivist Model (i.e., orientation, elicitation of ideas, restructuring of ideas, application of ideas, and review phases) with embedment of Jigsaw-II in the idearestructuring phase, and post-tested; and this was triangulated by qualitative responses from the student teachers. The analysis of the quantitative dataset using the t-test for paired samples indicated that the post-test mean score (17.04) was statistically significantly higher (t = 5.02, p< .001) than the pre-test mean score (15.84), and that the effect size obtained was +0.66, which is educationally significant. Two further analyses, namely by group (i.e., because the same intervention was applied to two different groups) and by gender, supported that this result was truly the outcome of intervention (treatment) effect instead of any disguised effect. The discussion and open responses from the student teachers gathered during orientation and review phases were qualitatively analysed through a recursive process, resulting in the identification of three overarching key themes in terms of what the student teachers have learnt about HIV/AIDS which they did not know prior to the intervention: differences between HIV and AIDS, modes of HIV transmission, and HIV status by look.