Attitude of Students of Different Occupational Parents towards Mathematics (A Study on Tanahun District)

Abstract

This study is mainly concerned to find out the attitude of secondary level students of different occupational parents towards mathematics. It is also aimed to compare the attitude of students according to their parent’s occupation and also the attitude of boys and girls towards mathematics. An opinionnaire “Fennema and Sherman mathematics scale” were used to collect the data for the study. The set of opinionnaire consists of 48 statements with four sub-scales: confident scale, usefulness scale, male domain scale and teachers’ perception scale each of which contain six positive and six negative attitude statement. The opinionnaire was distributed for 245 students of five schools: two private and three public schools. The schools were selected by stratified sampling method. Boy and girl students were grouped according to their parents’ occupation. Each student for study was selected by lottery method. The response received was scored by Likert’s five point scale. It was adopted with the value 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 assigned for strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree and strongly disagree respectively in each positive statement and 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 for negative statement. Mean and percentage was used to determine the attitude of students of different occupational parents and also to find the attitude of boy and girl students of different occupational parents towards mathematics. Using ANNOVA table (f-test) was used to compare the attitude of students of different occupation of the parent and t-test was applied to compare the attitude of boys and girls. Both tests were applied at 0.05 level of significance. For the finalizing process, the study has been organized into five chapters. First chapter deals with background of the study, the role of home environment in learning mathematics, the world history of mathematics, different mathematical movement, historical development of mathematics in Nepal, meaning of attitude, statement of problem, objectives of study, statement of hypothesis, significant of study, delimitation of study and definition of terms. The second chapter contains information about the researcher conducted in the similar area. The third chapter deals with methodological aspect of the study, collection and arrangement of the data. Forth chapter contains analysis and interpretation of data. Fifth chapter contains the summary, finding and their recommendation of the study. At the end bibliography and appendix are incorporated. On the basis of analysis and interpretation of the data the following major findings were drawn: - All the students of different occupational parents have positive attitude towards mathematics. - Both the boys and girls have positive attitude towards mathematics. - Boy students of different occupational parents have similar attitude towards mathematics. - Girl students of different occupational parents have similar attitude towards mathematics. - There was no gender wise significant difference attitude score.