• Quantity versus quality

Quantity versus quality

The Malawi government has implemented a number of reforms in order to improve the current situation especially to increase access to and retention at all levels, and improve the quality and the relevance of education. It introduced the new primary school curriculum through the Ministry of Education in all primary schools starting with Standard 1 in 2007.

This study assesses Standards 3 and 7 learners’ achievement levels in mathematics, Chichewa, English and life skills in Malawi at the beginning of their being exposed to the new curriculum in the two classes.

Major findings from the Standard 3 group include:

• in general standard 3 learners performed relatively better in numeracy and mathematics than in the other learning areas - learners’ performance was lowest in English
• standard 3 girls performed relatively better in English, Chichewa and life skills than boys - on the other hand, boys performed fairly better in numeracy and mathematics than girls
• standard 3 learners from urban areas performed relatively better than those from rural areas across the board.

For the standard 7 group:

• standard 7 learners’ mean percentage score in Chichewa (39.80%) was higher than that in English (14.87%) and mathematics (14.76%). The lowest mean percentage score was in life skills (10.47%)
• standard 7 boys did better than girls in mathematics, life skills and English while girls did slightly better than boys in Chichewa
• standard 7 learners from Lilongwe city and Blantyre city performed better than learners from the other districts in all the four subjects. Standard 7 learners from Zomba rural were the lowest in all the four tests. This shows that learners from urban locations had higher mean percentage scores in Standard 7 than those from rural locations
• most Standard 7 learners were not able to display competence in most of the content areas for the subjects that were studied.
  

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