FACTORS INFLUENCING THE ATTITUDE OF SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS TOWARDS THE STUDY OF MATHEMATICS.

Abstract
Secondary school students could like, enjoy, or in the opposite, hate mathematics. Attitude could be described as a long-term positive or negative emotional disposition towards mathematics. There is a correlation between students’ attitude towards mathematics and their mathematical results, thus it is important to develop a positive attitude towards learning mathematics. The main objective of this study is to find out the factors influencing the attitudes of secondary school students towards the learning of mathematics. The researcher used descriptive survey research design to investigate the factors influencing the attitudes of secondary school students’ towards the learning of mathematics. A set of questionnaire was used to gather data. The descriptive and inferential statistics analyses were used to analyze all the research questions. The target population comprised of thirty two (32) secondary schools in Onitsha zone, made up of Onitsha North, Onitsha South and Ogbaru local Government Areas. The sample size was calculated using Taro Yamani theory. From the findings of this study, culture, societal influence, parental attitudes, teacher attitudes, learners’ perceptions are the factors that influence the attitude of students towards the learning of mathematics. In conclusion the research results show that the most important factor influencing attitudes of secondary school students towards learning mathematics is the teacher. This research work recommended that mathematics teachers should positively direct students on how to study and learn mathematics and also teach them well.

2Statement of the Problem
Attitudes formed by students when learning mathematics tend to remain for a long time and these attitudes may help him/her to learn mathematics better (Evans, 2015). This is so if the attitudes were favorable. But this may not always be the case. Students also form unfavorable attitudes as they learn mathematics in secondary schools.
Findings of Orora, (2006) indicate that pupils in primary schools who have very positive attitudes towards learning mathematics have interest to do more mathematics later. Most students join Primary One with positive attitudes, only to change their attitudes towards learning mathematics later in secondary school. Reports indicate that the most glaring weakness in student’s mathematics attainment is the students’ lack of knowledge of elementary techniques and their ignorance of simple algorithms and processes. This could have resulted from students’ failure to learn these techniques, algorithms and processes while being taught in class. The Ministry of Education has initiated in-service training courses for mathematics teachers in secondary schools. This was in an effort to improve teacher’s teaching techniques. Despite these efforts, students still did not learn mathematics adequately to enable them perform better in mathematics examinations. Failure to learn is an indication that there could be other factors such as inappropriate teaching methods, lack of resources and students’ negative attitudes among others hinder effective learning of mathematics Costello (1999). There could be other factors such as student’s attitudes which may hinder them to adequately learn mathematics that had not been fully studied in Nigeria generally. This study attempt to unravel the factors that influence the attitude of secondary school students toward the learning of Mathematics.

1.3 Purpose of the Study
The main aim of this research is to extract factors influencing the attitudes of secondary school students towards the learning of mathematics.

The objectives of this study are to:
i. Establish attitudes that secondary school students form towards learning of mathematics.
ii. Find out whether attitudes form by students contributed to inappropriate learning of mathematics and consequently poor performance in the subject.
iii. Establish factors which influence formation of attitudes towards learning of mathematics among secondary school students.