Secondary Students’ Performance Index in Mathematics

Performance of students in mathematics has been the focus of so many studies in education. Its fluctuating record in national and international arena calls the attention of every researcher in mathematics to refocus their attention to identifying latent that possibly explain this performance. This current study believes that students’ performance in mathematics can be predicted by some latent variables. These sets of possibly correlated manifest variables are combined to form latent variables that are transformed into a set of values of linearly uncorrelated variables called principal components. These components would then become the input to the model predicting secondary students’ performance in mathematics. Moreover, Regression Analysis was employed to develop a model predicting secondary students’ performance in mathematics. The study revealed that peer relation index, luxury index, and personal characteristics were significant predictors of Mathematics performance among secondary students. More so, it supports social-cognitive theory and strengthens its foundation that cognition and social relation greatly determines the behavior and performance of social individuals.

Keywords: Mathematics, Students’ Performance in Mathematics, Latent Factors, Manifest Variables, Regression Analysis, Social-Cognitive Theory