SKILLS LEARNING COMPETENCY OF THE SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN THE PHYSICS LABORATORY

Practical skills occupy a pivotal position in the laboratory teaching learning process. Developing the practical skills in the students is a very common objective of teaching Physics. Laboratories are one of the characteristic features of education in the sciences at all levels. It would be rare to find any course in any institution of education without a substantial component of laboratory activity.This paper describes the performance of girl students’ skills learning at secondary school level in the Physics laboratory. A teacher made criterion - reference test was applied to measure three practical skills that is measuring skills, graph drawing skills and graph interpreting skills. The objectives were to study competency in measurement skills, in graph drawing skills and in graph interpreting skills. Only eight percent of the student achieved the mastery level in any of the three skills. The performance of the students in measurement skills was comparatively better than the other two skills. The performance of the students in graph interpreting was very poor of all the three skills.It is important to think about the ways of teaching in the context of laboratory work and also the facilities in the laboratories. In developed countries like UK, where great time and money is spent on doing practical work in schools, there is a need for sound empirical based evidence to justify the laboratory work. For developing countries, like Pakistan, the same justification is needed in order to set up and manage good laboratory for all science courses.This study has aimed at exploring the competency in Physics laboratory skills learning of the secondary school level students.Only 8% students achieved the mastery level in learning the three skills. The competences of the students were much below than the criterion marks (80%) fixed for this study