Secondary students' attitude towards Mathematics and its impact on Mathematics achievement of Fuvahmulah / Aishath Abdullah Didi

Abstract:

The main aim of improving students' performance towards mathematics should be having positive attitude towards the subject. Mathematics is an important subject in lower secondary education. However, the students' performance in mathematics of Fuvahmulah has been decreasing year by year. Therefore, there in an essential need of investigating factors like attitude and achievement to check whether it has any correlation in mathematics' performance. The main objective of the current research is to investigate the correlation between students' attitude and performance. The second objective is to identify the differences between gender and attitude. Under each objective, the four key components of attitude are determined. The two main questions; 1. Is there any relationship between students' attitude and their achievement in mathematics? 2. Is there any significant difference between male and female in their attitude towards mathematics? A quantitative research study design was employed and the population comprises of students of grade 10 of the secondary school of Fuvahmulah. The sample consists of 122 respondents from the population of 179 students. The instrument used was a 4 point Likert scale questionnaire consists of 47 items with positive and negative implications. Data were analyzed using SPSS. The results of the statistical revealed that there was a negative correlation between students' attitude towards mathematics and achievement in mathematics and there was no gender difference on attitude towards mathematics.