Comparative Assessment of Student and Teacher Perception of the Curriculum Content Difficulty in Further Mathematics

The study comparatively assessed the extent of student and teacher perception of content difficulty in the Further Mathematics Curriculum (FMC).The analytical survey research design was adopted for the study. The study was conducted in Gokana local government area of Rivers State with a population of sixty (60) senior secondary class three students offering Further Mathematics from the twelve (12) public senior secondary schools in the area. Census sampling technique was used to select the sample of 60 students used for the study. The instrument for data collection was the researchers’ made and validated Further Mathematics Curriculum Content Difficulty Assessment Questionnaire (FMCCDAQ). The test and retest method and Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation (PPMC) were used to obtain 0.73 reliability coefficient of the FMCCDAQ. Six research questions and one hypothesis guided the study. Mean and standard deviation were used for data analysis. The study found out that students perceived all the FMC themes of pure mathematics, coordinate geometry, statistics, mechanics and operations research difficult to learn. Teachers perceived all the themes of the FMC easy to teach. There is significant difference between student and teacher perception of the FMC content difficulty. The study among others recommended that teachers should employ diagnostic and remedial instructional strategy and active learning strategies such as problem solving and problem-based learning strategies to remediate the learning difficulties among students in the FMC.