Background to the Study
Mathematics as a subject affects all aspects of human life at different degrees. The social, economic, political, geographical, scientific and technological aspect of man is centered on numbers. Disciplines where numbers are predominant and form integral part of mathematics include: statistics, accounts, arithmetic, engineering, etc. For example the earliest civilization of mankind came through mathematical manipulations.
The inter-relationship between mathematics, development and advancement of humans shows the importance of mathematics in life due to its numeral and symbolic nature, it is more related to the scientific and technological facets of man’s world than to any other aspect as it occurs and re-occurs in the physical and natural sciences.
The basic skills underlying all scientific and technological skills are the control of the tools of mathematics.
Mathematics is seen as the language used to describe the problems arising in most branches of science and technology. It is a subject that is related to other school subjects in areas like number and numeration, variation, graphs, fractions, logarithms and indices, algebraic processes, solution of equation and also in area and volume.
However, schools are established for the purpose of teaching and learning. It is also more important that the teachers and learners are properly accommodated to facilitate the teaching and learning that go on there. This is the essence of the school plant and facilities (Alimi 2004). Therefore school facilities are the space interpretation and physical expression of the school curriculum. The performance of students in mathematics has been a great concern to the society. Awokoya (1975), Fafunwa (1980), both agreed in different researches that we live in a world where science and technology have become an integral part of the world culture, therefore for any nation to be relevant, it must not overlook the importance of mathematics in her educational system.
The performance of students in any academic task has always been of special interest to educators’ parents and society at large. The primary concern of any educator who is entrusted with the responsibility of selecting students for any advance training programme in a given field is the ability to estimate as accurately and as early as possible the probability that such candidates will succeed or fail.
It has been observed that secondary schools in Osun State appear to be densely populated while classrooms seem to be over-congested. It has shown the views of previous researchers on class-size and school types in various countries. In view of the divergent opinions, the problem of this study was to determine what influence class-size and school types had on the quality of output from secondary schools