Impact of Inductive and Problem-Solving Teaching Methods on Students’ Performance in Geometrical Concepts of Mathematics among Junior Secondary School Students in Katsina State, Nigeria

Abstract

The study investigates the impact of Inductive Teaching Method (ITM) and Problem-Solving Teaching Method (PSTM) on the performance of Junior Secondary School two (JSS II) students in Geometry Concepts. The study applied a pre-test post-test experimental design. There are 12 Zonal Education Quality Assurance (ZEQA) zones with a total of 251 Junior Secondary Schools and a population of 300,125 Junior Secondary School year two (JSS II) students in Katsina state. The population comprises of 166,270 male students and 133,855 female students. The strata of 12 ZEQA zones were used and one school was randomly selected from each zone. In each selected school, 60 students were randomly selected for the three classes i.e. 20 students per class which were randomly assigned for traditional (control), problem-solving and inductive (experimental groups) methods. Consequently a total 720 JSS II students were selected for the experimental and control groups. The instrument used for the data collection for both pre-test and post-test was the Geometry Performance Test (GPT) with reliability coefficient of r=0.84. The arithmetic means, standard deviations and t-test were applied using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23 to test the three hypotheses at the 0.05 level of significance. The analysis showed that the problem-solving and inductive methods of teaching were more effective than the traditional method in the teaching of geometry concepts. However the result also showed that there is no significant difference in the performance of students taught with the inductive method of teaching and those taught with the problem-solving method of teaching. Given these discoveries, it was suggested that the utilization of both problem-solving and inductive teaching methods should be encouraged in teaching geometry concept and the necessary facilities and equipment needed for their effective use should be provided by the government and school authorities.