Impact of manipulative materials in teaching mathematics at primary level

Abstract

There are many problems in the field of teaching learning process. Most of the teacher and students think mathematics is difficult for teaching and learning. Mathematics teacher face many problem while giving clear concept to the students. It is clear that the use of manipulative materials helps to understand easily in teaching mathematics. It makes easy to teaching and learning activities and it can be use the facilitate teaching and motive students for clear teaching. Manipulative materials are related to sensory organs and they provide the visual and the sensory experience to the students. So, the researcher planed to study the impact of manipulative materials in teaching mathematics at primary level. The objectives of this study were to compare the achievement of mathematics of the grade V student taught by using manipulative materials and without using manipulative materials and to explore the feelings of student and their activities in the class while teaching them by using manipulative materials. For this study pre-test, post-test, non-equivalent group design was adopted. Fifty-five students of two schools were selected at Chitwan district. Both groups were taught by researcher herself on the selected topics ‘perimeter, area and volume’with and without using manipulative materials respectively. The experimental group and control group were determine by tossing a coin. Pre-test was administered before the experiment started. The experiment runs for the duration 1 month. After 1 month a post-test was administered on both groups and then mean, standard deviation and variance was calculated. On the performing t-test, the null hypothesis was rejected.Finally the researcher conclude that the achievement of students of experimental group is better than the achievement of control group. So, mathematics teaching by using manipulative materials causes better achievement than teaching without using manipulative materials at primary level.