Development and validation of mathematics persistence scale for secondary school students

Abstract

The study focused on development and validation of the mathematics persistence scale (MPS) for measuring secondary school students’ persistence in learning mathematics. The study employed a descriptive survey design. Three research questions guided the study. The population of the study comprised 13,516 students distributed in 59 public secondary schools in Nsukka Education Zone, Enugu State, Nigeria. A multi-stage sampling procedure was used in selecting a sample size of 1,378 secondary school mathematics students used for the study. In the development of MPS, 85 items were first constructed and subjected to face validity. After face validation, eight items were deleted in line with the recommendations and suggestions of the validators. The remaining 77 items were further subjected to exploratory factor analysis using statistical package for the social science version 25. 28 factorial pure items, that loaded into four salient factors (persistence in classroom mathematics exercise, persistence in mathematics take home assignments, persistence in a group mathematics tasks, and persistence in mathematics examination) emerged from the analysis. Confirmatory factor analysis of four factors using lavaan and semPlot packages indicated a harmony between four factor model and the data. The internal consistency coefficients of four factors ranges from 0.78 to 0.92.