Abstract:
Mathematics education is the bedrock of scientific and technological development in any country.
Mathematics is an important vehicle for the development and improvement of a person's intellectual
competence in logical reasoning, spatial visualization, analysis and abstract thought. Despite all these
benefits, the problem of poor achievement in mathematics has continued to rear its head, and few
students offered mathematics as a course in tertiary institution compared with other subjects. This
study sought to determine difficulties encountered by students in the following mathematics
contents: vocabulary of mathematics, number properties and arithmetic operation among junior
secondary school students in Adamawa state. The study employed descriptive survey research design
with a sample subject of 200 mathematics teachers across 110 junior secondary schools in Yola
metropolis. Questionnaire was used to gather data from the respondents, the statistical tool for
analysing research questions were mean and standard deviation. The result of the study showed that
students have moderate level of learning difficulties in all items except on applying the operations to
solve word problem which has high level of difficulty. It is recommended that possible ways of
teaching these terms should be employed by teacher so as to reduce or overcome the level of
students' learning difficulties in mathematics. |
