Teachers’ Workload and Students’ Attitude toward Mathematics in Senior Secondary Schools in Kogi State

Olojede Abiodun Isaiah, Jegede Oadele Emmanuel

Abstract


This study was prompted by the increasing workload size of secondary schools’ teachers and the poor attitude exhibited by students towards mathematics.  The study sought to find out and group the workloads of 30 mathematics teachers randomly selected from Kogi Central Senatorial District and compared with the attitude of their respective students to mathematics. There were three groups for teachers’ workload utilized for the study namely High, Average and Low workloads to which the comparison of students’ attitude was done. The study was guided by two research questions and two hypotheses. The design Ex- post facto was used for the study. The instruments used for data collection were Mathematics Teachers’ Workload Inventory (MTWI) and Students’ Mathematics Attitude Scale (SMAS). The research questions were answered by the attitudinal levels of the students while the research hypotheses were analyzed by Kruscal Wallis and Mann Whitney statistics at P ≤ 0.05 level of significance by the aid of computer software Statistical Packages for Social Sciences (SPSS version 21). The Kruscal Wallis statistics showed a significant difference between Mathematics Teachers’ Workload and Attitudinal levels of students taught by teachers of High, Average and Low workloads and that students taught by the teachers with Low workload had the highest attitude level to mathematics among the three. Furthermore, the Mann Whitney statistics showed no significance difference in the attitude of students taught by Male and Female Mathematics Teachers of any workload rating. Based on these findings, it was recommended that a Low workload of a 10 hours maximum a week should be assigned to mathematics teachers. Consequent to this, it is recommended that more mathematics teachers should be recruited to cope with increasing   number of students’ population and school teachers’ workload.

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References


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