The study investigated effects of Gagne’s instructional strategy (GIS) on retention in Mathematics among senior secondary school students in Kogi state, Nigeria. The research adopted quasi-experimental-control design involving pre-test, post-test and post post-test. The population consists of all SS II students totaling 20,835 students from three (3) senatorial districts in Kogi State. 300 SS II students (140 males and 160 females) were sampled from six intact arm of classes from six (6) schools (two each) in 3 senatorial districts in Kogi State using multi-stage cluster sampling technique. Mathematics Performance Test (MPT) was used as instrument for data collection with a reliability coefficient of 0.68 obtained using Pearson Product Moment Correlation Coefficient (PPMC). Two research questions were raised and two hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. The research questions were answered using mean and standard deviation while the hypotheses were tested using related sample t-test, and paired sample t-test respectively. The findings reveal that: there was significant difference between the post-test and post post-test mean retention scores of students taught mathematics concepts using GIS and there was also significant difference between the post-test, post post-test mean retention scores of male and female students taught mathematics concept using GIS. The study concluded that Gagne’s instructional strategy has significant effect in improving student’s retention ability as well as capable of improving male and female students’ retention ability in mathematics. It was recommended among others that the three tiers of government federal, state and local governments through ministry of education should organize seminars and workshop to equip secondary school mathematics teachers on the use of Gagne’s instructional strategy.
Idris et al. (Thu,) studied this question.