Chapter 3
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The Least Mastered Fundamental Operations in Mathematics
Using Mathematics as a subject for intervention, the following operations were pretested. Afterwards, these were checked and tallied for analysis. The results of the pretest is displayed in Table 2 shown below. Table 2. Results of the Pretest of Grade II pupils in Mathematics
Fundamental Operations in Mathematics No. of Items Mean Score No. of Pupils who got 60% up No. of Pupils who got 60% below
Addition
10
8.81
27
0
Subtraction 10 7.37 24 3
Multiplication 10 3.19 0 27
Division 10 2.07 0 27
Table 2 presents the pretest on the fundamental operations in Mathematics where students need improvement. Based on the pretest in…show more content… Anghileri (2010) highlights the fact that multiplication, unlike addition and subtraction, is a ‘binary’ operation with two distinct inputs for the multiplicand and the multiplier. Nunes and Bryant (1996) also maintain that multiplication and division help improve children’s thinking to a significant degree. Another reason for the difficulty of multiplication is the range of situations in which the concept of multiplication can arise. Relatedly, Back (2011) explained that a lot of teachers struggle with teaching division to children. She also identified number of factors contributing to this problem. Firstly, by the middle of Stage 2 there is a huge range of level of understanding of the concept of division and secondly the concept itself can be thought of as building on children's understandings of addition, subtraction, and multiplication. Division becomes complex because it operates on other basic fundamental operations such as subtraction and multiplication.
Pretest and Posttest Performance of the Grade II-B Pupils
After the pretest, personal tutoring was employed to enhance the learning performance of the respondents on the least mastered fundamental operations. After the three-month intervention program on multiplication and division, a posttest was administered to determine its effects on the learning performance…show more content… The same is true in division, which is almost four times higher than their scores in the pretest. The scores on the pretest and posttest were significant with (13.521) t-value in multiplication and (18.248) in division. This means that personal tutoring as an intervention program proved to be effective in enhancing the learning performance of pupils on multiplication and division. This implies that they have finally learned the basics on the least mastered operations which could help them to cope with the lessons. In addition, they can now confidently participate in the discussions on the third and fourth grading during which those topics are taught. The results of the study further imply that if the pupils were given more time and attention by and more resources from the teacher, they improve their learning and performance (Ysseldyke & Algozzine,