Comparing The Effectiveness of The Teaching Based on The Exploratory Learning and The Functional Teaching on The Interest and Academic Progress of The Students

The aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of teaching method based on exploratory learning method with functional teaching method on the interest and academic achievement of 11th grade students in psychology course.  The research was quasi-experimental with pre-test and post-test design with experimental and control groups.  The statistical population of this study included all students studying in the 11th grade of the Department of Humanities in the city of Divandere in the academic year 2021-2022.  In this study, simple random sampling method was used and 60 people were selected and assigned to three equal groups of 20 people. The questionnaire of interest in studying Claire and Sobia (1993) and the score obtained in psychology were used for the purpose of data collection.  The collected data were analyzed by descriptive statistics, parametric default tests and analysis of covariance with SPSS version 26.  The results showed that in the post-test stage, there is a statistically significant difference between the mean of the two methods of exploratory and functional teaching with the control group in the variable of academic achievement.  Also, the results showed that both exploratory and functional learning methods could lead to improving interest in education in students of experimental groups (P <0.05), but the difference between the effect of these two methods on the variables of interest in education and academic achievement was not significant (P <0.05).