Towards improving rural learners’ mathematics achievement: The roles of social relationships and identities

Abstract

This study initially starts as a research journey towards improving rural learners’ mathematics achievement by interrogating the roles which teacher-learner social relationships and learners’ mathematical identities could play. To make the journey productive, the study was framed with critical realist philosophy and social realist perspective because of their greater concerns for reality in general and social reality in particular, respectively. However, both realist assumptions were found not robust enough to fully explain the key findings that emerged from the evidential data gathered. The curiosity to fill this gap led to another research journey that re-examined the two realist positions. The new research journey eventually brought in new philosophical and sociological viewpoints maintained and by extension methodological approach employed in the study. That eventually led to the dominance of the second research focus and the suspension of three of four objectives of the initial research focus. Employing mixed research designs (i.e., correlational and case study design) and mixed methods (i.e., questionnaires and interviews) inspired by the viewpoints and approach respectively, I was able to select four Nigerian rural schools and 237 learners for quantitative study, of which five of the learners participated in the qualitative study. All the data collected from the learners through the questionnaires and interviews were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively respectively. The results/findings show that generally there is a strong relationships between teacher-learner social relationships and learners’ mathematical identities for learners in rural schools in Nigeria. It also show that the nature of relationships can be validly considered as direct, indirect and neither direct nor indirect to provide deeper insights. At a much deeper level, it practically generated and explained why the relationships and the learners acted the way they did regarding mathematics. These findings were used to justify the new philosophical, theoretical and methodological views maintained in the study. The fundamental view, being philosophical, maintains that reality is a whole which is analytical separable to entities that are necessarily dependable on one another. This novel and debatable position deviates from existing Bhaskar’s CR philosophy and expected to shape any future study that has greater concerns for social reality such as mathematics learning.