Abstract
This study investigated the Impact of Polya‟s Problem Solving Strategy on Attitude, Performance and Retention in Algebra among Junior Secondary School Students in Zamfara State, Nigeria. Quasi-experimental and Control group design involving pretest, posttest and postpost- test was used for the study. The population for this study consisted of all the public junior secondary school three students in one hundred and eighty (180) schools under ZSTSB that are in four Education Zones of Zamfara State. The total enrollement figure in the schools consisted of 27,357 students. Eight out of one-hundred and eighty schools in the four Education Zones were selected by balloting method. Four schools were assigned to experimental groups and the other four as control groups. One intact class was drawn from each of the eight selected schools by balloting method, giving a total of 463 JSSIII students used for the study. The experimental group had 235 students while the control group had 228 students. The experimental groups were taught by Polya‟s problem solving strategy and the control groups were taught by conventional method. The experimental period lasted for six weeks. The instruments used for data collection were SLEWPPT, SLEPT and ASAIQ. These instruments were validated by five specialists in mathematics education and one specialist in language education. The reliability coefficients of SLEPT and ASAIQ were computed and found to be 0.792 and 0.826 respectively. Six research questions and six corresponding null hypotheses were formulated and used to test the significance atï ï€Â 0.05 . The independent sample t-test and Mann-Whitney U test were used for data analysis. Findings from the study showed that students in the experimental group performed significantly better than those in the control group. It also revealed that experimental group significantly achieved positive attitude than the control group; also the retention level of students in the experimental group significantly exceed those of the control groups. The results also indicated that males in the experimental group had better attitude and performed significantly better than females. From the findings of this study, it was concluded that Polya‟s problem solving strategy was effective in promoting students‟ attitude and performance in algebra than the conventional method. In addition, students taught algebra with Polya‟s problem solving strategy in small groups have better attitude and performance than students taught algebra with conventional method. Based on the findings of the study, it was recommended among other things that State Government should train mathematics teachers in the effective use of Polya‟s problem solving strategy in teaching various mathematical topics through series of workshops and seminars in order to improve the attitude performance and retention of students in mathematics at the secondary level.
