Page 28 - Professorial Lecture - Prof Kasanda

In order to improve our students’ understanding and hence reduce poor
performance in mathematics at UNAM (see Tables 2(a) to (e)) a rigorous
tutorial system should be enforced. It should be made mandatory for all
students pursuing mathematics courses to attend at least one such
tutorial in their courses during the semester. A number of graded
assignments should be assigned for students to work out during the
tutorial sessions. The assignments should be graded by a student tutor,
who also attends the lectures to know what, has been covered. I should
nevertheless hasten to point out that the Faculty of Science at UNAM
holds such tutorials (Miranda, Gideon, & Mugochi, 2013, p. 666). But,
groups of 80 students in one tutorial session are inefficient to address all
students’ difficulties or problems. This will not reduce drastically the
student poor performance in mathematics courses at UNAM. The groups
need to be reduced further to 40 or less.

At the school level, the creation and running of mathematics clubs by the
students should be encouraged. A mathematics teacher could act as
patron of such a club. Student identified mathematics activities and
problems should form the main activities in such clubs.

In order to ensure that the mathematics teachers possess appropriate
teaching skills and subject content knowledge, the mathematics heads of
department should run Continuous Professional Development (CPD)
workshops on a regular basis to address problems identified by the
teachers in the school. These CPD workshops could address the content
that the majority of teachers find difficult to teach, application of “new
teaching methods”, assessment skills, etc. If no expertise is found within
the school such expertise could be found from outside the school. CPD
provision will require money to run effectively, which should be made
available if we are to see better learner performance in mathematics. In
this way we will be addressing Clegg and Courtney-Clarke’s (2009, p. vi)

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