Factors Determining Mathematics Performance of High School Students: Implications for Teacher Education

Abstract

The alignment between the goals of pre-service education and that of in-service education is important. Institutions which offer a degree in education must constantly connect and understand the experiences of the teachers and learners in the elementary and secondary schools so that they can offer better undergraduate programs. This study explored how critical thinking skills of secondary students contribute to their Mathematics performance. There were 236 secondary student participants in this study from a private high school in Mindanao, Philippines. Correlational design was utilized in this study. A questionnaire was used to gather data on critical thinking skills of the students. The questionnaire has undergone Rasch analysis with reliability indices of .88 (high) for Part 1 and .77 (moderate) for Part 2 thus establishing preliminary evidence of construct validity. Using path analysis, the model showed that critical thinking skills significantly explained the Mathematics performance of the participants. The results called for a need to address the teaching of critical thinking skills among secondary students because this will benefit the facilitation of better Mathematics performance. Critical thinking skills must be taught alongside Mathematics content. Teachers carry out multiple roles of delivering the content at the same time honing the critical thinking skills of the students. Undergraduate education specifically for teacher education has an important role to play in preparing future teachers on how to develop critical thinking skills of their students. It is a two-way task of developing future teachers to be critical thinkers and teaching them how to teach such skills to their students so that when they are in the field of teaching, they teach both content and critical thinking skills.