THE EFFICACY OF GAME-BASED APPLICATION ON PUPILS WITH DYSCALCULIA IN NORTH-EAST, NIGERIA

This paper presents the efficacy of game-based application on mathematics basic skills' mastery of pupils with dyscalculia in primary schools in north-east Nigeria. Two objectives and two research hypotheses were formulated for the study. The researchers made use of an experimental research design; the pre-test posttest control group design. The study was conducted in ten randomly selected (10) primary School from six (6) state in north-east zone where the researchers purposively sampled eighty pupils (80) with mathematics difficulties. Test was concurrently administered to all the pupils at their respective schools by employed trained research assistants for the first time (pre-test) then intervention followed using game-based app  for five (5) schools selected as experimental group and regular teaching strategies used for the remaining five (5) schools selected as control group all for the period of thirty (30) minutes each per three (3) days over the length of eight (8) weeks after which the researchers  re-administered the same tests (posttest). Scores were collated and fed into the statistical package for social sciences (SPSS). The t-test for dependent samples was used to test the research hypothesis which shown that, the pre-test means scores of both experimental and control group insignificantly differ shows that t(78)  0.74, p  0.05. Based on this it could be deduced that both the groups are equivalent in terms of performance before receiving any form of treatment. The posttest mean scores on the other hand indicated that pupils in the experimental group was found to have risen  84.27, while that of the control group was   76.64. It was therefore observed that the result of the experimental group is higher than that of the control group and independent sample t-test was ran to ascertain whether the different observed was statistically significant. With the statistic t(78)  4.56, p  0.05, the two groups were observed to significantly differ in favor of the experimental group, this has significantly shown that game-based app is effective in remediation of pupils with dyscalculia in north-eastern Nigeria.