Concerned: Professor Mellony Graven of Rhodes University.
South Africa’s declining maths grades in schools need urgent attention and collaborative action, experts agreed at a debate hosted by the Mail & Guardian and the FirstRand Foundation in Sandton last week.
Academics and representatives of schools, unions, NGOs and public and private sector organisations participated in the FirstRand CSI that Works and the Mail & Guardian’s Improving Maths Performance Debate. The debate was seeking answers to the questions of why pupils’ maths marks are declining, and what should be done to improve the situation.
The Annual National Assessments (ANA) — a national assessment of language, numeracy and maths ability carried out in the foundation and intermediate phase and in grade nine — as well as the results of the 2014 matric exams indicated a serious problem with maths skills among pupils.
Edward Mosuwe, deputy director general for curriculum management and delivery at the Gauteng department of education, said it was cause for concern that in the 2013 ANAs, 26% of grade three pupils and 94% of grade nine pupils scored less than 40% in the test. Data from the 2014 national senior certificate (NSC) results indicated that only 42.3% of pupils had taken maths as a subject at grade 12 level, with the rest of the pupils taking maths literacy instead.
The department of basic education said that in last year’s NSC exam, only 35.1% of pupils scored over 40% for maths and the number of candidates who achieved over 30% for maths literacy dropped from 87.1% in 2013 to 84.1% in 2014. Umalusi said in December that the maths literacy performance had been significantly worse in 2014 than in any previous year.
Mosuwe said that the focus on matric results was often flawed: “When we release the matric results, all we are interested in is the percentage pass, not the quality of the NSC results.”
He said the declining maths marks raised the question of whether schools were pushing maths literacy to maintain their overall pass rates, instead of trying to improve maths teaching and learning.
The reasons for the disappointing maths marks across the country are multi-layered and vary by region, expert speakers noted. In addition to the implementation of the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) in 2014, speakers at the debate pointed to staffing challenges, gaps in teachers’ content knowledge and coherence, red tape and a need to focus greater energy on addressing challenges in maths education at foundation phase.
Getting the foundations right
Professor Mellony Graven, Numeracy Chair at Rhodes University, said: “There is a mismatch between the level of maths taught and the level of maths learnt. The ANAs show that by grade four, pupils are already two years behind expectations. There needs to be recovery at this level, because you cannot build if the foundations aren’t present.”
Mosuwe agreed, saying: “Interventions to improve pupils’ maths performance have focused on the upper grades, and neglected the lower grades.” More needed to be done to understand the problem and address it as a matter of urgency, he said.
“If the challenge is content knowledge, I ask — what is it about this content that we can’t get right? I am convinced that as a country and a system, we have sufficient bodies of knowledge to understand the situation,” said Mosuwe.
Addressing teacher development
While the finger is often pointed at teachers, society fails to appreciate the challenges teachers face, said speakers and delegates in the debate. They noted that systemic red tape impacted on how teachers taught and how much time they had available to undergo professional development courses. Staffing budgets and problems with filling vacancies were also a challenge, they said.
Although content knowledge and capacity were recognised challenges, addressing them through short professional development courses or “train the trainer” programmes was not always successful, said speakers.
Mosuwe said: “We take teachers for a two-day workshop or use a cascade model for training and think this will work. We need to find other means for ongoing teacher training, such as the use of ICTs.”
More on the job training, allowing teachers to “grow into their role”, as well as ongoing coaching and capacity building could help, said speakers.
Scaling up interventions
NGOs and academic institutions have had some success in localised programmes to improve maths teaching and learning, speakers said. However, whether these programmes could be effectively scaled up to national level raised some debate.
Barbara Dale-Jones, chief executive of Bridge, said: “We have to be careful about what we select to take to scale. Scale requires effective change management, planning and effort. It need not be just about replication of what works — going to scale could also entail connecting parcels of excellence.”
Describing this as “expanding the sphere of influence”, Graven said connecting successful interventions would likely be more effective than simply trying to scale up localised programmes. “When you go from micro to macro scale, the programme moves to another system altogether. A lot of what works locally is not suited to scale,” she said.