Attitudes of student towards imple mentation of mathematics curriculum in public secondary schools in Embakasi district, Kenya.

Abstract

The study set out to investigate attitudes of students towards implementation of mathematics curriculum in public secondary schools in Embakasi district, Kenya. It looked into detail the habits associated with attitudes towards implementation of mathematics curriculum namely; the habits associated with despair, fear; aggression and apathy. Attitudes of students towards their mathematics teachers and difference in male and female attitude towards implementation of mathematics was also studied. The descriptive survey design was employed in the study. Questionnaires were used to gather information from the students and interview schedule from the teachers. Simple random sampling was used to select 4 secondary schools, stratified random sampling was used to select 240 students and purposive random sampling was employed to select 12 teachers. The techniques of data analysis were percentages and frequency distribution for the quantitative data while for the qualitative data, content analysis was employed. From the analyzed data, it was found that the attitudes of the students change from hopeful, fearless, non aggressive and active towards the implementation of the mathematics curriculum in F1, to mediocre in F3 leading to despair, fear, aggression and apathy in F4. It was also seen that teachers and teaching resources affected the attitudes of the students. However, the teachers had a different opinion of the students’ attitude towards the implementation of mathematics curriculum stating that it was negative. Though generally there was no change in the attitudes of the students towards implementation of mathematics curriculum because of gender difference, there was some change seen in the class of F2. Several factors were attributed to this change, one of them being adolescence. Based on the findings the key recommendations made were that SMASSE should focus more on changing the attitudes of the teachers than of the students, KIE in conjunction with TTCs should revise the curriculum of the TTCs so that the students are empowered to tackle the ever challenging topics in mathematics, KIE could try come up with a curriculum that is motivational at F2 level, the Ministry of Education could consider lowering the entry age of girls into secondary level of education by one year and the Ministry Information and Communication could come up with policies that assist in demystify mathematics. Further research was recommended in such areas as; the study of attitudes of students in TTCs towards mathematics, the study of attitudes of boys and girls at the age of 16 towards implementation of mathematics curriculum and the perception of mathematics teachers towards TSC.