Availability and Utilization of Instructional Materials for Teaching Mathematics in Senior Secondary Schools.

Abstract

The dwindling general performance of students in mathematics has been a source of concern to all stakeholders in education. This study investigated theavailability and utilization of instructional materials for teaching mathematics in senior secondary schools in Ibadan south-west local government, Oyo state, Nigeria. Tworesearch questions were formulated and descriptivesurveyresearch design was used for the study. Simple random sampling was used to select four schools and a sample size of 100 students participated in the study. Two instruments were developed to generate data for the study. The reliability coefficient values obtained were 0.7and 0.8 respectively. Data analysis involved the use of descriptive statistics. The result shows that 100 (100%) of the respondents indicated that textbooks are available, while 4 (4%) of the respondents claimed that textbooks are not available. Also, 99 (99%) of the respondents indicated that chalkboard are available and adequate, while only 1 (1%) of the respondents claimed that Chalkboard are not available. The instructional materials has mean of 2.2. Again, 20% of the respondents claimed that they highly utilized models, 10% indicated averagely utilized, 40% said slightly utilized while 30% indicated not utilized. From the findings on this study almost allthe respondents identified that textbooks and chalkboard are the most available and been utilisedinstructional materials for teaching mathematics in secondary schools.This implies that most schools still stick to conventional „chalk and talk‟ system of teaching mathematics which may not enable secondary school students to compete with their counterparts in the global world. Therefore, Proper utilization of other instructional materials such as models should be utilized to expose students beyond „chalk and talk‟ system of teaching which will also improve academic performance of students.