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This study examined the effects of explicit reading strategy instruction on the comprehension of Ethiopian EFL students. In total, 123 students at Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia were randomly assigned into two groups. The experimental group was taught with explicit reading strategy instruction while the control group was taught with skill-based teaching for a semester. Pre- and post-reading comprehension tests were used to determine whether explicit reading strategy instruction helped the students in enhancing their reading proficiency. The results of this study showed that the students who received reading strategy instruction made greater gains in reading comprehension than students who were taught with conventional skill- based teaching. The theoretical implications of these findings for higher education reading curriculum design, and future research directions are then presented.

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of using inquiry-based writing instruction on students' academic writing skills. A pretest-posttest two groups quasi-experimental design was employed. Data were obtained through test, focus group discussion, and reflective journal from 62 first-year pharmacy students who were selected using comprehensive sampling. While the experimental group received the inquiry-based writing instruction, the control group learned using the conventional learning method. The quantitative data were analyzed using independent samples T-test and descriptive statistics when the qualitative data were analyzed thematically. The findings revealed that there was a statistical difference between the control and experimental groups in their academic writing performance. Hence, students who participated in the inquiry-based writing instruction improved their academic writing skills. Mainly, students who learned through inquiry-based writing instruction were able to produce essays that addressed task achievement, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy. Thus, this study recommends researchers, teachers, and students to pay due attention to inquiry-based writing instruction in their academic journey.

The developmental period of the African science curriculum has principally viewed Science Process Skills (SPS) as a major outcome. However, the scarcity of review regarding the African studies in SPS points to a crucial gap in the related literature. This warrants the need to review research articles on SPS thereby identifying common findings and distinguishable trends. Therefore, this review aimed to analyze and evaluate research studies conducted on science process skills in the context of African countries. The method carried out in this research was a systematic literature review. It involved analyzing and synthesizing studies that focused on science process skills in the African science education from 2002 to 2021. The researchers obtained 106 articles in the initial searching activity. Then, they screened out the abstract of these articles to determine their relevance. From this screening process, 34 SPS studies in different African countries published from 2002 to 2021 were synthesized and analyzed. The review of research trends on SPS-related issues conducted in African countries focused on the following points: contributor African countries, main SPS-related issues discovered by the studies, and the methodologies used by the researchers. Based on the result of this review, the top three SPS-related issues identified were; determining variables affecting SPS (23.52%), developing science curriculum via SPS (17.64%), and developing students' and teachers' SPS (17.64%). The results also revealed that most articles were contributed from Nigeria (44.11%) and the most frequently used research design and methods were quantitative research design (58.82%) by quasi-experiment, survey, and ex-post-facto methods. The most frequently used data collection tools were achievement tests (45.71%) and document analysis (31.42%), and the most frequently used samples were the students at high schools (65.71%). Since science curriculum plays a vital role in improving students' SPS, the results of studies under investigation suggested that curriculum developers may increase the number of science activities when developing science curriculums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]