ABSTRACT

The study sought to find out the effects of mastery learning models on students’ achievement in Mathematics in Secondary Schools in Akwa Ibom State. Five research questions and five null hypotheses were formulated. The quasi-experimental design was used. The population of the study consisted of 3,022 senior secondary class two (SSII) students from 81 public co-educational secondary schools in Uyo Education zone of Akwa Ibom State.  A sample of 150 students were selected using purposive sampling technique and assigned to three streams namely  (personalized group) A, (group-based) B and  (control group)  C. Two researcher-developed instruments were used in the study namely Mathematics Instructional Package (MIP) and Mathematics Achievement Test (MAT).  The two instruments which were subjected to face and content validation by three research experts had reliability indices of 0.74 for the objective tests and 0.78 for the essay test. The data collected were analysed using the mean, standard deviation and Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA).  The findings revealed that students in the two experimental groups performed significantly better than those in the control group. The personalized model emerged as the most effective teaching strategy in enhancing students’ achievement in Mathematics than the group-based model and conventional method of teaching. It was also found that there were significant differences among the mean achievement scores of low, average and high ability students in Mathematics when taught with mastery learning strategies. Furthermore, there was no significant difference between the mean achievement scores of male and female students in Mathematics when taught with mastery learning strategies. Moreover, there was no significant interactive effect of teaching method and gender on students’ achievement in Mathematics. It is recommended, among others, that Mathematics teachers should be encouraged to adopt the mastery learning models in their instruction while the conventional method of teaching should be de-emphasized.