Department of Social Studies

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Browsing Department of Social Studies by Author "Chiwenite, Clement Anyaegbu"

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    DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF INSTRUMENTS FOR ASSESSING NIGERIAN SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENT, INTEREST AND ATTITUDE IN MATHEMATICS
    (DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATIONS FACULTY OF EDUCATION NASARAWA STATE UNIVERSITY, KEFFI, 2015-09-17) Chiwenite, Clement Anyaegbu
    The study was designed to validate two instruments developed by the researcher for assessing Nigerian senior secondary students’ achievement, interest and attitude in the study of mathematics. The purpose of the study was to develop and validate instrument for assessing Nigerian Senior Secondary School students’ achievement, interest and attitude in the study of mathematics. The questions answered by this work are, what are the logical validity indices of the instrument and the psychometric properties of the instrument? The research design employed is instrumentation and survey research designs. The first instrument -Mathematics Instrument For Measuring Interest and Attitude, code-named MIMIAT was developed and validated for use to assess students’ interest and attitudes in the study of mathematics. It is made up of 33 items from two parts A and B. Part A contains three Bio-data items of the students and B contains 30 items for assessing the students’ interests in and attitude to mathematics. This instrument has a logical validity index of 0.89 and construct validity index of 0.80. Its reliability index is 0.80. The second instrument achievement test in mathematics (ATIM) was developed and validated for assessment of students’ achievement in the study of mathematics. It is a-20 item instrument which has a logical validity index of 0.88 and reliability coefficient 0.81. The following psychometric properties were equally established for the cognitive instrument; mean facility index = 0.51, mean discriminating index = 0.83, mean distracter index = -0.36. The instruments were administered to a sample of 1200 SSI students selected through multistage stratified random sampling and application of purposive sampling strategy in the geopolitical areas selected and the data collected was analyzed both manually and with the use of SPSS to carry out Biserial correlation, t-test, Pearson Product Moment Correlation and ANOVA. Other findings of the study are: there is no significant difference in the mean response of male and female students in the affective instrument for Mathematics; there is no significant difference in the achievement of male and female students in the cognitive instrument for Mathematics; there is no significant difference between the mean responses of the students from urban and rural areas in the affective instrument, but the mean scores of the students from urban area differed significantly from that of the students from rural area in the cognitive instrument. The study also shows that significant relationship exists between students’ interest in Mathematics and their achievement in Mathematics and there is significant relationship between students’ attitude to Mathematics and their achievement in Mathematics. It was also revealed that while there is no significant difference between the mean responses of the students from different geopolitical zones in the affective instrument, the mean difference in the scores of the students from different geo-political zones in the Mathematic aptitude test is significant. The researcher concluded that the instruments are usable irrespective df gender and school location and that students who have positive interest in and positive attitude to Mathematics are likely to achieve high scores in Mathematics. The researcher recommends that Guidance Counselors should make use of these instruments while counseling students on the subjects they will study. That Federal and State ministries of Education may find these instruments useful while admitting students into senior secondary one class. Parents could use these instruments to ascertain whether their wards can mathematics related courses in future instead of just allowing them to enroll for such courses. School authority may find these instruments useful while streaming students into classes. pursue mathematics and xi