Exploring Challenges Faced by Secondary School Students in Understanding Taxation: An Expert Perspective Using the Nominal Group Technique

Abstract

Taxation is financial knowledge that all workers in various sectors worldwide need to know. The introduction of the subject of taxation in several countries is aimed at increasing the understanding of students who are future workers to increase awareness among young people. This study explores the challenges faced by secondary school students in understanding taxation concepts, using the Nominal Group Technique (NGT) to gather insights from expert mathematic teachers. Through learning, students tend to struggle to comprehend various important tax laws and procedures. Although tax education is vital for enhancing future tax obedience, a major difficulty arises from the fact that while the topics mentioned above are covered in the Malaysian secondary school curriculum, basic financial literacy is low, and tax content is rather abstract. Based on NGT sessions, five experienced teachers with more than fifteen years of teaching experience in mathematics at the tertiary level engaged themselves in finding out the issues and challenges of the students. The discoveries identified eight significant areas of challenge in regard to the concepts of tax, and these were due to the difficulty in understanding more conceptuality, inadequate focused curriculum and mode of delivery by lecturers/facilitators, and lack of adequate interactivity in the teaching process. Therefore, this research emphasizes the need to provide systematic financial literacy training and to supplement the curriculum with attention-grabbing examples that would make the students more interested in taxation.