Academic Performance and Retention of Male and Female Secondary School Students Taught the Mole Concept Using the Just-In-Time Instructional Strategy in Zaria, Kaduna State, Nigeria

The Mole Concept is a fundamental but challenging area of secondary-school chemistry because it requires students to integrate conceptual understanding, mathematical reasoning, and problem-solving. This study examined differences in the academic performance and retention of male and female Senior Secondary II chemistry students taught the Mole Concept using the Just-In-Time Instructional Strategy (JiTT) in Zaria Education Zone, Kaduna State, Nigeria. A quantitative, one-group pretest–posttest–post-posttest design was adopted. The sample comprised 231 SS II chemistry students (128 males and 103 females) selected from a public co-educational secondary school after baseline comparison of five randomly selected schools. Data were collected using the 40-item Mole Concept Performance Test, which had a test–retest reliability coefficient of 0.70. Mean, standard deviation, and independent-samples t-test were used at the 0.05 significance level. No significant gender difference was found in academic performance, t(229) = 0.78, p = .439, d = 0.10. However, male students recorded significantly higher retention scores than female students, t(229) = 2.51, p = .013, d = 0.33. The findings suggest that JiTT can support comparable immediate performance across gender, while additional reinforcement and retrieval opportunities may be needed to strengthen long-term retention