A Study of Attitudes of Students of Sainik Awasiya Mahavidyalayas Towards Mathematics and its Relationship with their Achivement

Abstract

The prime concern of this thesis is to explore the attitudes of the students of Sainik Mahavidyalayas towards mathematics and its relation with their achievement. For this, following objectives were formulated. i) To find the attitude of the students of SAM towards mathematics. ii) To compare boys and girls students’ attitudes of SAM towards mathematics. iii) To compare the mathematics achievement of the boys and girls students of SAM. iv) To determine the relationship between attitude and achievement in mathematics. To achieve these objectives, 100 students of class eight were taken from four Sainik Awasiya Mahavidyalays of Pokhara, Bhaktapur, Dharan and Surkhet. To fulfill the defined objective of this study, the required primary data are able to be gathered through the questionnaire developed by George Levine( 1971 AD). There were 32 statements with comprised four aspects of mathematics such as (i) attitude towards mathematics teaching, (ii) attitude towards mathematics as a process (iii) attitude about the difficulty of learning mathematics, (iv) attitude towards the place of mathematics in society. The attitudes of students providing three category of rating scales are as (i) agree (ii) neutral and (iii) disagree. The rating score of these scales were 3, 2 and 1 in favor of favorable, neutral and unfavorable response. For students’ achievements in compulsory mathematics researcher used annual exam report of required students. The mean, percentage, standard deviation, two-tailed t-test and correlation coefficient were used as statistical tools for the analysis of data at five percent level of significance. Based on the interpretation and analysis of the data, the following results which were found are mentioned as follows: 1. SAM students have the positive attitudes towards mathematics at lower secondary level. 2. There is significant difference between SAM boys’ and girls’ students’ attitudes towards mathematics at lower secondary level. 3. There is no significant difference in mathematics achievement between SAM boys and girls at lower secondary level. 4. There is no relationship between SAM students’ attitudes and achievements in mathematics at lower secondary level.