INFLUENCE OF SCHOOL LOCATION AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS ON MATHEMATICS STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENT IN NIGER STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

The study examined the influence of school location and socio-economic status on Mathematics students’ achievement in Niger State, Nigeria. The study adopted ex-post facto research design. A sample of 198 students was drawn from a population of 11, 275 senior secondary two Mathematics students in 240 co-educational public schools in 2020/2021 academic session using Multi-stage sampling technique. Two research questions guided the study and two null hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. Two instruments were used for data collection namely; Mathematics Achievement Test with a reliability coefficient of 0.83 and Socio-Economic Status questionnaire with a reliability coefficient of 0.81 established using Kuder Richardson. Research questions were answered using means and standard deviations while z-test was used to test the hypotheses. The findings revealed that students in urban schools achieved significantly better than their counterparts in rural schools and students of parents with high socio-economic status achieved better than students of parents with low socio-economic status. It was recommended among others that government should raise the standard of rural schools to the level of urban schools where the students achieved better in Mathematics than students in rural schools in terms of facilities and personnel.