Abstract:
Due to the current COVID-19 outbreak, the worldwide school students’ education has
been dropped in a considerable way. With that, the traditional on-class teaching
learning mode has to shift to an online mode. That has affected students’ academic
related activities, mentality, teacher-student relationship, and student-student
relationship. This situation emerged with computer-based learning as the closest
substitute instead of the on-class mode. The purpose of this comparative study was to
find the most effective teaching-learning mode between online and on-class modes to
teach science for grade 7 students. This scientific study is based on both quantitative
and qualitative approaches. Data were gathered from 30 students of grade 7 at a 1AB
school in the Kalutara Zone, Western Province. To collect data, the researcher used the
scores of six different unit test papers, the previous two science term test results,
answers to a Google form questionnaire, interviews and observations. The quantitative
data was analyzed using Microsoft Excel and Origin 6 data analysis and graphing
software. Qualitative data was analyzed through thematic analysis. According to the
results of this study, it has revealed that most of the respondents preferred to learn
science via on-class mode due to their bad experiences with online learning. This online
mode has negatively affected students’ unit test scores that have been given under three
lessons. These tests results and the students' views, perceptions, and preferences that
have been collected through a questionnaire have provided evidence to confirm that the
junior secondary students are willing to learn science subjects through an on-class
teaching learning mode. But 19.3% of them accepted some positive factors of the online
mode due to its easiness to use from anywhere, flexibility, and less time-consuming to
answer for online examinations etc. Moreover, some students’ proficiency levels have
affected their unit test scores when the teaching learning mode is online or on-class.
