Effectiveness of Instructional Materials on Mathematics Achievement of Students

Abstract

In the educational field in Nepal the teachers and students are facing many problems in teaching learning process. In Algebra, teachers face many problems while giving clear concepts to the students. It is obvious that the use of instructional materials helps the students for better understanding and thus better achievement. Instructional material can be used to facilitate teaching and motivate students for clear instruction. These materials are linked to the sensory organs and they provide the visual and sensory experience to the students. So, the researcher intended to study the effectiveness of instructional materials in teaching algebra at lower secondary level grade VIII with the following objective. 1. To find out the effectiveness of instructional materials in teaching algebra. 2. To compare the achievement of students in algebra taught by using instructional materials and not using instructional materials. The design of this study is pre-test post-test non-equivalent control group design of experiment. In order to fulfill these objectives the researcher selected two schools randomly in Nawalparasi district. From each school 20 students of grade VIII were selected for sample of the study. The experimental and control groups were determined by tossing a coin. Both experimental and control groups were taught by researcher on the topic algebraic expression at grade VIII. The experimental group was taught by using manipulative instructional materials and control group was taught without using these factor kids (i.e. by conventional method). Pre-test was administered before the experiment started. The experiment run for the duration of 20 days. After 20 days post-test was administered on both groups and the mean scores was calculated. The different in mean achievement scores are tested by using t-test at 0.01 level of significance. Same content was taught to both the experimental and control groups from the same curriculum, same textbook prescribed by Government of Nepal. An achievement test paper was the main instrument for data collection for the study. Some questions were developed by researcher himself, some questions were taken from teacher's guide and specification grid of grade VIII which were published from CDC, Sanothimi Bhaktapur. For the pilot study twenty-four items were kept. Finally, the researchers concluded that the achievement of the students of experimental group is better than the achievement of the students of control group. So, algebra teaching by using different manipulative instructional materials causes better achievement than teaching without such instructional materials.