Learning numbers was most important for counting toys and telling the time for grade 2 students in suburban Nairobi. However simple the expectation might sound, survey data show that only half the children in grade 4 have the basic numeracy skill like identifying numbers.
Low numeracy skills at an early grade not only impede gaining further mathematical skills but also have lifelong impact.
Higher numeracy skills, along with literacy skills have a strong correlation with performance in the job market. Judging by the data, many Kenyan students are deprived of such a critical skill.
A new way of teaching reading, writing and basic math
But the Kenyan government has opened a new chapter on teaching literacy and numeracy to its students. Improving literacy and numeracy has been made a priority in national education and a new methodology is being piloted. The country is embarking on an ambitious reform program to improve students’ performance in languages and mathematics.
In the 2013 National Education Sector Plan (NESP) the government clearly said that “ensuring that all Kenyan children are able to read, write and do basic mathematics by the end of grade 2 provides the essential foundation for successful future learning and contribution to Kenya’s social and economic vision set out in Kenya Vision 2030.”
The NESP, developed with support from the Global Partnership for Education, goes even further and gives a robust strategy to improve mathematics teaching.
The NESP’s multipronged approach for improving teaching mathematics to young children includes new methodologies of teaching math in teacher training courses; developing new learning materials, and conducting continuous assessments of teaching and learning in order to measure the effectiveness of the new methods. Similar steps are planned for improving literacy.
New strategy is successful
The evidence of success of the new strategy is compelling. A 2-year project supported jointly by U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.K.’s Department for International Development (DFID) piloted the methodologies in 547 formal and low-cost private schools in the Kenyan capital Nairobi and adjacent counties. In late 2013, rigorous evaluation demonstrated that the piloted approach improved reading skills nearly three times faster in comparison to control schools. The following graph shows the improvements in several math skills in the pilot schools in comparison to control schools over a period of one year.
In a recent visit to one of the pilot classes I saw the new range of teaching strategies in action. A grade 2 math teacher in the Langata West School kept the children busy for half an hour with a series of exercises on counting forward, backward, identifying missing number in a series and doing single digit additions.
She used the teaching materials, including charts and the blackboard creatively and asked students to do exercises from their books. She later provided feedback to students on their performance. A staff of the teacher advisory center was monitoring the teaching on that day. She was taking note of the teaching activities and later discussed the monitoring report with the teacher.
The teacher later mentioned that the combination of training, new materials and the classroom observation made her job a lot easier and she can now see the difference it made to the skill level of her students.
Addressing systemic problems
The project evaluation also pointed out systemic issues that need to be addressed for sustainable results. Accountability and governance are key among those related to school. Issues like allowing teachers to spend more time teaching in classrooms; selection of supplementary learning materials; and creating appropriate incentives for classroom observation and feedback. In short, it called for changes in how teachers teach - changes that can only be sustained through better school governance and management.
New support by the Global Partnership for Education
A new $88.4 million grant from the Global Partnership supports a program that will scale up successful methodologies for math teaching across the nation and will address these systemic issues. At the same time, USAID and DFID are supporting the Tusome program, which will scale up literacy methodologies across the country. The GPE supported program will start in March 2015 for four years and will be supervised by the World Bank.