Procedural Fluency of Students in the Learning Competencies in Grade 8 Mathematics

Abstract

INTRODUCTION

In today's mathematical classroom where the spiral progression approach has been used, educators need to extend students' awareness on how to improve their procedural fluency. As observed, most students failed to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills they need to solve different kinds of problems. Most of them appeared to experience severe problems in learning and benefiting from the mathematics taught to them resulting in poor performance. With this increasingly alarming students' performance, this study was conceptualized. In this study, the level of students' performance in Mathematics 8, their level of procedural fluency and their correlation were investigated.

METHODS

A descriptive design was utilized in this study. The respondents were Grade 9 students from public secondary high schools inArea III, Division of Batangas Province for the school year 2017-2018. Out of 6, 354 students, a total of 377 participants was determined using Raosoft at a 5% margin error. Moreover, stratified proportional sampling was used in order to determine the number of Grade 9 student-respondents among the 23 public secondary schools in the said area. Documentary analysis was done to determine the performance of the students in Mathematics 8 and a self-constructed test was also used to assess the students' level of procedural fluency in Mathematics 8. Statistical tools like mean, standard deviation, percentage, and Chi-square were utilized to treat data gathered.

RESULTS

The majority of the respondents have a satisfactory level of academic performance in Mathematics 8. It was also found out that students showed varying levels of procedural fluency by competency. Moreover, the level of procedural fluency in all aspects showed a significant relationship with students' academic performance by competency. Intervention activities which consist of well-directed and guided activities were also designed to address students' weaknesses in terms of flexibility.

DISCUSSIONS

The results revealed that the proposed intervention activities be validated for acceptability and appropriateness of content for Grade 8 students. Teachers were also encouraged to provide varied activities that favor different methods or strategies in order to improve students' procedural flexibility. Similarly, a more comprehensive assessment tool in measuring procedural fluency may also be developed in order to improve the teaching-learning process. A similar study may be conducted to validate the findings of this study.