Page 27 - Professorial Lecture - Prof Kasanda

appropriate everyday contexts showing where mathematics is used within
our environment and the students’ daily lives and ensuring that our
Mathematics teachers and lecturers reflect and possess a high level grasp
of both the “mathematical knowledge for teaching” (Hill, Rowan, & Ball,
2005, p. 396) and the “pedagogical content knowledge” (Cochran, King, &
DeRuiter, 1991, nd) . Further, for UNAM to improve the grasp of first year
mathematics there is need for an aggressive tutorial system that helps
students to deepen their understanding of mathematics. Teaching
relationally will prove helpful for most of our students. Further there is
need to encourage our students to form communities of learning (BuFour,
2004) in which students taking similar courses will be encouraged to share
ideas and learn from each other. We need to encourage these
communities of learning at our University for improved student
performance.

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

In my view, we have made tremendous strides in ensuring our students
learn mathematics by making the study of mathematics compulsory for all
learners (Ministry of Education, 2010). But, we can do more to ensure that
our students’ performance improves. As indicated in Table 1(a) we need to
reduce the failing grades of E to I (incomplete). It is my hope that as
UNAM continues to bring out appropriately qualified primary school
teachers there will be greater improvements in our students’
understanding and performance in mathematics, teachers who will display
specialized subject content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge
and curricular content knowledge that will enable them to be efficient
mathematics teachers. Accordingly, the following suggestions for
improvement of the teaching and learning of mathematics are given:

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