Introduction

In 2015, the international community reached an agreement on “Sustainable Development Goals” to be achieved by 2030. These new international goals cover issues of conservation of environment and energy, and inclusive pre-primary, primary, secondary, tertiary, and vocational education. Quality improvement in these areas was part of the goals. This research project focuses on the efforts of the Republic of Zambia in improving the quality of education.

Zambia has participated in the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (hereafter, SACMEQ) since 1999 and has consistently recorded poor performance. For example, in SACMEQ II it was found that 67.3% of the Zambian Grade 6 pupils did not even meet the “Basic Numeracy” category (Hungi et al., 2010). Basic calculation ability is the foundation for further mathematics and science, and an essential component of the human resources needed for the middleand long-term development of society. Hence, in 1996 the Ministry of General Education (MoGE) of Zambia established the “Educating our Future,” an educational policy that prioritized numeracy and literacy (Ministry of Education, 1996; Ministry of Education, Science, Vocational Training and Early Education, 2013; Ministry of National Development Planning, 2017).

Since 2002, Hiroshima University has sent graduate students as volunteers to Zambia in cooperation with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) as part of a unique educational program, which is explained in the section 2.1. Mr. Uchida was among the first batch of students of this program, and collected information on the context and issues of mathematics education in Zambia since there was no information at all. He studied the calculation abilities of primary pupils and identified the widespread use of a “counting-all” strategy without the use of grouping by tens (Uchida 2012). Furthermore, he developed a diagnostic evaluation method to investigate their calculation strategies using a Newman approach (Newman 1977; Clements 1980) that combined the use of concrete materials with oral questioning in the local language, Chinyanja. His most significant finding was that even poor performers showed some understanding of basic mathematics.

For the calculation ability, other researches (Nakawa, 2016; Uchida, 2009) found grades 5 and 6 pupils used counting strategies to solve problems, and it was not recognized as a major issue. In South Africa, Roberts (2015) conducted a similar investigation and identified three modes of representation–iconic, indexical, and symbolic–in the responses to word problems solved by Grade 2 pupils. He also found that the most common strategy was counting-all.

These studies have recognized that pupils acquire competence related to calculations by generally low but different degrees. However, they did not develop a tool to measure pupils’ numeracy competence and analyze their competence.

Therefore, in this project, we aimed at developing an assessment tool to identify Zambian pupils’ numeracy competence. Definition of numeracy competence will be provided later. Our target group were pupils from lower and intermediate grades (grades 1 to 4). This study was done to identify valuable information on the causes for low level of competence in numeracy and suggest a more effective teaching strategy to improve it.

Background

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Introduction Video of the Project Study

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