Investigation into Secondary School Students’ Attitude towards Learning of Geometry in Zamfara State, Nigeria

Abstract

Research findings in secondary schools have consistently indicated that geometry is one of the most difficult areas of Mathematics at basic level and students’ attitude towards it has been a factor that is known to influence students’ achievement in mathematics. The purpose of this study is to investigate the level of students’ attitude towards geometry and to find out whether gender difference influences such attitude. Some selected secondary schools in Zamfara state were used for the study. The study adopted a descriptive survey design using a questionnaire tagged Geometric Attitude Questionnaire. The population of the study consisted of SS I students in Zamfara state. A sample of 157students was drawn using simple random sampling technique. Descriptive statistics of means and standard deviations were used to answer the research questions while Inferential Statistics of the Mann-Whitney test was used to test the formulated hypothesis. The study revealed that students’ attitude towards geometry was relatively high generally, with male students having much higher positive attitude to geometry than their female counterparts and that difference between them was not statistically significant at α = 0.05 level of significance. It is recommended that teachers should be resourceful in encouraging and helping students in order to build positive attitude by trying to relate geometry to real life situations and also be gender sensitive.

Rethinking strategy on developing students’ levels of geometric thinking in Sokoto state, Nigeria

“…This situation indicates that Nigerian students' levels of geometric thinking skills are lower than the needed geometric reasoning as specified in the Senior secondary school mathematics curriculum. Most of the students in Nigeria show a negative attitude towards geometry, they do not answer questions on geometry, many lack an understanding of the basic knowledge of geometry, and many cannot correctly apply the theorem [17], [18]. Similarly, Ogan and George [19] investigated the problems of difficult concepts in the Senior Secondary School Mathematics curriculum in Nigeria, some of the difficulties identified are problems based on circle theorem, which include, the angle at the center of the circle, chord theorem, and angles among others.…”