Triangular law of students’ Mathematics Interest in Ghana: A Model with motivation and perception as predictor

The main purpose of this study was to verify by means of structural equation modelling (SEM) how students’ interest in mathematics (SIM) is affected by students’ perception and students’ motivation to learn mathematics. The study further investigated the effect of students’ perception (SP) on students’ motivation (SM) to learn mathematics. The study adopted a simple random sampling technique to administer 150 questionnaires to 10 public Senior High Schools in Ghana. In all, a total number of 1,500 students were given the questionnaire to indicate their responses. However, 1,263 questionnaires were properly administered, representing 84.3% response rate. The constructs reliability for SIM, SP, and SM were 0.71, 0.82, and 0.68 respectively. The further explored how the goodness-of-fit influences the measurement model, structural model and the overall model. The findings indicated that when Ghanaian high school students’ have good perception about mathematics and have the motivation to learn mathematics, their interest in mathematics would improve significantly.