The Effectiveness of Inductive Teaching in Mathematics

The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of inductive teaching in mathematics based on ninth-grade students' performance and the retention of learning regarding rules of exponents content. In this study, a quasi-experimental design with pretest, posttest, and retest was employed. This study was conducted with 92 ninth-grade students from an urban high school in Connecticut (experimental group, n = 46; control group, n = 46). While inductive teaching was carried out in the experimental group, traditional lecture-based instruction continued in the control group. Data was collected through a knowledge test, which consisted of 15 objective-type questions. The knowledge test was administered to the experimental and control groups as a pretest at the beginning of instruction, and as a posttest at the end of instruction to both groups. Seven weeks after instruction, the knowledge test was administered to both groups as a retention test of the rules of exponents topic information. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics, t-test, and ANCOVA with the pretest as the covariate. The results from this study indicated that inductive teaching significantly improved both students’ performance and retention of learning in mathematics when compared to the traditional lecture-based methods regarding rules of exponents.