Attitudes and Mathematics Performance among Grade 10 Students of Ungos National High School at Real, Quezon towards an Effective Mathematics Instruction

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

The issue of low-quality Mathematics education is one of the growing major concerns not only in the country but in foreign countries as well. Contributory to this low academic performance of our basic education is the Mathematics performance of students in Ungos National High School, at Real, Quezon. The Mean Performance Score (MPS) of the students in Mathematics for two consecutive school years, for 2014 -2015 and 2015 –2016, had been 67.49% and 67.64% respectively. This is far below the set standard passing percentage which is 75%.

METHODS

The research used the descriptive method. A survey-questionnaire was administered in gathering the data to determine the attitudes of the students towards the Mathematics subject, towards the teacher, and towards their classmates in relation to their Mathematics performance in Ungos National High School, S.Y. 2016 -2017 at Real, Quezon in an effort to devise ways towards an effective Mathematics instruction. It employed 142 fourth-year students in the said school. Furthermore, observations and interviews were made to validate the findings.

RESULTS

The respondents showed that their attitude towards the Mathematics subject is noteworthy. The same is true with both their teacher and their classmates. The majority of the students registered an "approaching proficiency" level of performance in Mathematics. With regards to the significant relationship between the student's Mathematics performance towards the subject, teacher and classmates, the attitudes of the students towards the subject have no significant relationship to their level of performance in Mathematics given by the coefficient of correlation or R-value 0.019 at 0.01 level of significance. On the other hand, the attitudes of students towards their teacher and the attitudes of students towards classmates have a significant relationship to their level of performance in Mathematics as shown by the computed correlation of 0.317 and 0.450, respectively, which reached a significance level at 0.01.

DISCUSSIONS

The results show that the teachers and the classmates of students adversely affect the students' performance in Mathematics. Therefore, teachers should continue to adopt different teaching strategies that can highly motivate the students to learn. With this, they should keep attending to seminar-workshops and training geared at refilling their reservoir of teaching strategies as a way of being able to appropriately address the nature, needs, and interests of their 21st-century learners.