Effect of Geoboard on Students’ Academic Achievement in Mathematics in Nsukka L.g.a

ABSTRACT This study focuses on investigating effect of using Geo-board on students' academic achievement in mathematics. The population of the study comprises of all the two thousand seven hundred and forty-two (2,742) Junior Secondary School Two (JSS2) students from the Ten co-educational secondary schools located in Nsukka Urban in Nsukka L.G.A. The research design adopted was quasi- experimental design of non-equivalent control group was used. The sample was made up of one hundred and fifteen (115) junior secondary school two (JSS2) students from two schools namely: Government Technical College (GTC) and City Comprehensive Secondary School (CCSS) Nsukka. The two schools were randomly drawn from the ten schools in Nsukka Urban in Nsukka L.G.A. Two intact classes of 63 and 52 students that made up the sample were respectively drawn from the two schools: GTC and CCSS. Random sampling was conducted on the two classes and as a result, the class of 52 students was assigned to experimental group and the class of 63 was assigned to control group. The experimental group was taught using Geo-board while the control group was taught without Geoboard. Three research questions were formulated and three hypotheses tested. The instrument for data collection was Geometry Achievement Test (GAT) adopted by the researcher and validated by science educationists of University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The instrument contained ten (10) items. Data collected were analyzed using mean and standard deviation to answer the research questions, while Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) was used to test the hypothesis at 0.05 level of significant. It was found through pretest that students have low level knowledge of geometry. The results of the post test revealed that students taught with geo-board performed better than those taught without geo-board. Gender of the subject had not affected their performance when Geoboard was used. Therefore, the students' use of improvised manipulative instructional materials such as Geo-board has the capacity to enhance their understanding of geometry. Thus, it was recommended that the use of Geo-board and other improvised instructional tool should be adopted by classroom teachers and the students to revive their interest in mathematics and to extinct the anxiety they have developed by bad teaching method that had been used to teach them previously.