Abstract

ASSESSING AREAS OF STUDENTS? DIFFICULTIES IN THE LEARNING OF STATISTICS CONTENT IN SECONDARY SCHOOL MATHEMATICS CURRICULUM IN BAYELSA

Charles-Owaba, Tekenate

---

Abstract The study examined areas of students? difficulties in the learning of statistics content in secondary school mathematics curriculum. Descriptive survey design was adopted and the sample comprised of 639 SS3 Students in twelve Government owned secondary schools drawn from the eigtht (8) educational zones of Bayelsa State. Four research questions and two research hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. The instrument was ?Assessing Areas of Statistics Difficulties Questionnaires (AASDQ)? developed by the researcher and validated by two Lecturers in Science Education and one Lecturer in Measurement and Evaluation. The reliability of the research instrument, was established using Kudder-Richardson 21 formula and reliability co-efficient of 0.75 obtained was considered reasonable. Mean and standard deviation were statistical tools used for answering the research question while the hypotheses were tested using z-test at 0.05 level of significance. Findings revealed that secondary school students have perceived difficulties in statistics content. It was also revealed that lack of experienced mathematics teachers, non-completion of statistics content, deliberate skipping of statistical concepts, amongst others were the causes of difficulties associated with learning statistics content. Therefore, it was recommended that mathematics teachers should adopt varieties of instructional methods to teach statistics content. Keywords: Assessing, Student Difficulties, Statistics Content, Mathematics Curriculum.

PDF