Effects of Mayer’s Problem Solving Instructional Model with Visual Representation Component on Student’s Academic Performance and Retention in Algebra among Senior Secondary School Students in Katsina Central Senatorial District of Katsina State

The research is on the effects of Mayer’s problem solving instructional model with visual representation component on students’ academic performance and retention in algebra among senior secondary school students in Katsina Central Senatorial District of Katsina State.The model was embedded with visual representation component to make it very suitable and practicable in teaching some abstract concepts in Mathematics. The senatorial district comprises of eleven (11) local governments out of which five were randomly selected and they were Batagarawa, Dutsin Ma, kaita, Kurfi and Katsina local governments and the research work lasted for four (4) months. In these 5 local governments, there were 21,188 students comprising of 12,220 male and 8,968 female in the public schools. In each of the selected local governments, 2 classes of 40 students each were selected from the randomly selected public schools as experimental and control groups giving a total of 400 students. Mayer’s problem solving model was used to teach the experimental groups while the control groups were taught using the conventional teaching method. Algebra Performance Test (APT) was used by the researchers and its coefficient of reliability was determined to be 0.73. Descriptive statistics, t-test and ANCOVA at alpha level of 0.05 was used for the hypotheses testing.The results show that in all the 5 local governments, there is a statistical difference between the experimental and control groups in favour of those taught using Mayer problem solving model. It was also discovered that there is no statistical difference in the academic performance of males and females taught using the Mayer’s problem solving model.It was recommended that the government and other stakeholders should assist in training the teachers and provide ICT components that support Mayer’s visual presentation in senior secondary schools