The Development of Learning Activity Packages Based on the Inquiry Approach of Mathematics for Secondary 8th Grade Students in Schools Under the Department of Education and Sports, Champasak Province, Lao People’s Democratic Republic

Abstract

This research aimed 1) to develop mathematics learning activity packages with the efficiency criteria of 75/75 and to study the effectiveness index of each mathematics learning activity package, and 2) to study the overall effectiveness index of the mathematics learning activity packages based on the inquiry approach in the title of fractions for mathematics learning strand of 8th grade. Cluster random sampling was employed to select 31 eighth grade students of Bankrang Secondary School in academic year 2018. Research instrument included 7 mathematics learning activity packages based on the inquiry teaching method with the overall of 14 hours for learning activities. Overall suitability of the developed learning activity packages was at the highest level with the average value of 4.52. Another research tool was a multiple choice achievement test with 40 items and 4 choices for each item. The difficulty indices of the test were between .21 - .75 and the discrimination indices ranged between .23 - .58, with the reliability value of .739. The basic statistics for data analysis were mean, standard deviation and percentage. Results found that 1) the efficiency of mathematics learning activity packages based on the inquiry approach for fractional learning was 76.18 / 76.05 which was higher than the criteria 75/75 and 2) the overall effectiveness index of the learning activity packages is 0.5849.