DRILL-AND-PRACTICE, PEER-TUTORING INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES AND MATHEMATICS STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IN IKONO LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA

This study was carried out to investigate the effect of drill-and-practice and peer-tutoring instructional strategies on students’ academic performance in Mathematics in Ikono Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom State. Three research questions and corresponding null hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. A quasi-experimental research design was adopted for the study. The population of this study comprised all the 4,293 JSS2 students in Ikono Local Government Area of Akwa Ibom State. The sample of this study consisted of 94 JS2 students drawn from two public secondary schools in the study area. Simple random sampling technique was used for this selection. A researcher developed instrument entitled Mathematics Performance Test (MPT) was used for data collection. The instrument was subjected to face and content validity by a Mathematics’ teacher in a secondary school and two experts in test and measurement in the Department of Science Education, Akwa Ibom State University. A reliability coefficient of 0.78 was obtained for the instrument using Kuder Richardson-20 (KR-20) reliability estimate. Mean and standard deviation were used for answering the research questions while independent t-test was used for testing the hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study revealed that students taught using drill-and-practice instructional strategy performed significantly better than those taught using peer-tutoring instructional strategy. The result revealed no gender difference in students’ academic performance when taught using drill-and-practice and peer-tutoring instructional strategies. Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended among other things, that Mathematics teachers should be encouraged to incorporate drill-and-practice and peer-tutoring instructional strategies as this will help students to become active participants in the learning process thereby enhancing their performance in the subject irrespective of their gender.