Assessment of Students' Perception of Content Difficulty in the Nigerian Further Mathematics Curriculum

Abstract

The study assessed the extent of students' perception of content difficulty in the Nigerian Further Mathematics Curriculum (FMC).The descriptive survey research design was adopted for the study. The study was conducted in Gokana local government area of Rivers State, Nigeria with a population of sixty (60) senior secondary class three students offering Further Mathematics from the twelve (12) public senior secondary schools in the area. Census sampling technique was used to select the sample of 60 students used for the study. The instrument for data collection was the researchers' made and validated Further Mathematics Curriculum Content Difficulty Assessment Questionnaire (FMCCDAQ). The test-retest reliability method and Pearson's Product Moment Correlation (PPMC) statistic were used to obtain 0.73 reliability coefficient for the FMCCDAQ. Six research questions guided the study. Mean, standard deviation and simple percentages were used for data analysis. The study found out that students perceived 88.20% of the Further Mathematics curriculum content difficult to learn with learning difficulties in all the FMC themes of pure mathematics, coordinate geometry, statistics, mechanics and operations research indicating poor FMC implementation. The study among others recommended a holistic review of the Nigerian FMC contents and improved instructional effectiveness through training and re-training of Further Mathematics teachers.