Investigating the Influence of Senior High School Students' Affective Variables and Teacher-Student Relationship on Student Performance in Mathematics in the Cape Coast Metropolis

Abstract

A total of 3,342 Form Two students from 69 intact classes were randomly chosen along with their 57 teachers from the ten public Senior High Schools in the Cape Coast Metropolis. The students and their teachers were engaged to investigate the influence of student anxiety, student attitude, student motivation and teacher- student relationship jointly and individually. The response rates for students and teachers were 77% and 86% respectively, indicating that 2,575 students and 49 teachers participated in the study. This research followed a mixed methods design. The data collected from quantitative sources were analysed using inferential statistics and frequency counts. While those collected from interviews were analysed qualitatively and presented as narrative with some examples. Findings revealed that the variables; student anxiety, student attitude, student motivation and teacher-student relationship jointly explained 18% of the variance in achievement scores and attitude emerged as a salient predictors of student achievement in mathematics. All the variables made statistically significant contributions to predicting achievement scores. In addition, the sub constructs of the four variables collectively explained 44% of the variance in achievement scores. It is recommended that the schools should facilitate in-service training for their mathematics teachers on the impact of affective variables on student Performance in mathematics. Likewise, students should be engaged in debates on the influence of affective variables on learning generally to create awareness on the effect of affective variables on the learning of mathematics in particular.