DEWEY’S PEDAGOGY OF INTEREST AND THE PERFORMANCE OF STUDENTS IN MATHEMATICS: A SURVEY OF SCHOOLS IN BABESSI SUB-DIVISION, CAMEROON

Resumé

John Dewey contends that interest plays a primordial role and determines a student’s performance in the teaching-learning transaction. This paper sets out to investigate this theory within the experience of students’ interests and performance in Mathematics. In order to attain this objective, we adopted a descriptive survey design. The target population of this study comprised all forms five students in government secondary (grammar) schools Babessi sub division. Purposive sampling was used to select the type of school and random samplings were used in selecting the schools and students. The questionnaires were administered to students as a means of collecting data. The accessible population was 138 students from the four selected schools. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyse the data. The hypothesis was tested with the use of the Pearson product moment correlation at a 0.01 level of significance. The study found that students’ interests have a significant effect on their performance in Mathematics. The students generally have interest in Mathematics, though this alone may not significantly provide good performance as seen in their Mock results for the 2017/2018 academic year where they had 14% pass in Babessi Sub Division. There are other mediating factors including student effort and commitment that may connect interest and performance. Also, from the findings, the students’ interest in Mathematics did not reflect their performance. This could be attributed to other intervening variables which are not considered by this study. Based on these findings, we recommended that curriculum designers and teachers should articulate subject-integration where Mathematics is taught as an essential curricular value for all other career subjects. This is the basis to reinforce students’ interests and performance in the subject.