Factorially Derived Cultural Factors of Gaborone Senior Secondary School Students and Mathematics Performance

Abstract

More work has been done to try and explain why some students tend to perform better than others. The degeneration of students’ performance not only in mathematics but across most subjects in Botswana has been an issue to most stakeholders for quite several years till today.Mathematics performance is closely associated with the scientific and technological innovations worldwide. Countless factors have been analyzed to explain why some students attain higher levels of academic achievement than other students. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which cultural factors like gender stereotype, cultural values and language barrier predict the student performance in Mathematics in senior schools in Gaborone, Botswana. Stratified random sampling was used to get a sample size of 300 from senior schools in Gaborone. The inferential survey study used a questionnaire as the main instrument for data collection”. The validity as well as the reliability was assured where the reliability index for the independent variables come out to be all more than 70. Informed consent, confidentiality, privacy were assured to the respondents. Statistical Packages for Social Sciences was used in analyzing data. The results from hierarchical sequential regression showed that gender stereotype was a poor predictor. Cultural values and language barrier significantly predicted Mathematics performance even though it was at a low strength. Based on these results, appropriate discussions and recommendations were made.