Development and Validation of Geo-TAN Instructional Software Package for Teaching Geometry in Senior Secondary School

Abstract

Students have consistently showed significant weakness in geometry. Majority of the candidates in the senior secondary school examination avoid questions drawn from geometry, specifically questions based on chord properties, circle theorems and tangent to a circle. Teaching of Mathematics in secondary schools in Nigeria is mostly done using conventional expository method which has been identified as a major cause of students’ poor performance in Mathematics especially in geometry. In this 21st century, teaching and learning of many topics in Mathematics require the use of computer and this entails that relevant instructional software packages that teach specific lessons especially the difficult and abstract concepts such as geometry should be developed. In this study GeoTAN Instructional Software Package (GISP) was developed, validated for teaching geometry in secondary schools in Nigeria. GISP was developed for use in the following application software namely; Cinema 4D, Macromedia Flash 8, Macromedia Fireworks 8, Microsoft Word and Adobe Audition. The software development models that were adopted in the development of GISP are Gerlach and Ely; and ADDIE models. A three-stage validation process was used in validating GISP. Educational Software Package Rating Scale (ESPRS) was used by seven Mathematics educators for content validation of GISP. Kendall's Coefficient of Concordance was used to analyse the rating scores in order to determine the agreement or concordance among the raters and reliability of the GISP. The result revealed Kendall's W of 0.82 which indicated that there is agreement among Mathematics educators that the subject matter contents of the developed GISP sufficiently covered the required areas of geometry in senior secondary school two (SS2) Mathematics curriculum. The result showed also that Mathematics educators rated GISP independently and it is reliable for instructional purposes. From the findings of this study, it was recommended among others that GISP should be used by Mathematics teachers in teaching geometry concepts to SS 2 students.