Attitudes Coded as Measures of Determining Students’ Performance in Mathematics

Abstract

The poor performance is even a major problem in rural areas, hindering a country’s economic competitiveness and development of human capital. In the school classroom, mathematics students lack the needed culture to read, understand, perform and apply tasks associated with the tasks. The aim of this study was to explore the various attitudes that measured students’ performance and find relationships among the factors. Exploring the pragmatic paradigm, the researchers used the descriptive design involving structured questionnaire of four-point Likert scale. This scale suitably combined both purposive and simple random sampling procedures to select 315 participants. The instrument was structured as Strongly Agree, Agree, Disagree and Strongly Disagree to simplify responses and yield faster and higher retrieve rate. Immediately after the data collection, the responses were coded in closed form to ease data analysis. Having perused many tools of data analysis, the researchers came to the conclusion that a combination of Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient, T-test, means, standard deviation and percentages were the most appropriate. While means, standard deviations and percentages were mostly used to determine the attitudes, Pearson Product Correlation Coefficient explored the relationships among the various variables. Consequently, the results revealed that the positive attitudes of parents, teachers and schools influenced students’ performance in mathematics. In fact, nearly 94% of the respondents’ attribute mathematics attitudes to parents and closed to 95% attributed mathematics success to teachers. There were also positive relationships among parents, teachers and school environment in determining students’ performance in mathematics. This means students with positive attitudes towards mathematics outperformed those with negative attitudes. It is recommended that parents, teachers and school heads thrive towards minimizing negative attitudes and rather maximising positive attitudes into school mathematics. We suggested that any replication of a future study should include private schools.