Review curriculum to improve performance
Results of last year’s Primary Leaving Examinations released last week show that candidates, especially in rural schools, performed worse in English language and Mathematics than in any other subject.
The Uganda National Examinations Board (UNEB) attributed this to candidates’ failure to interpret the questions, which are written in English. The National Curriculum Development Centre (NCDC) blamed teachers’ failure to interpret the thematic curriculum, which government introduced in 2007 to improve linguistic abilities at primary level.
The teachers’ low level of comprehension of the curriculum is understandable but not acceptable. Neither is it a surprise. Various research studies have shown many teachers failed to comprehend academic questions of primary level competency.
What NCDC and government should be looking at are the causes and suggesting appropriate redress. Training half-baked teachers, as NCDC suggests, who already cannot understand primary level questions will not make them interpret a thematic curriculum constructed in even harder language.
The 2007 curriculum wrongly anticipated that learning in their local languages, pupils in lower primary would enhance their linguistic abilities and later comprehend better when they transited into learning in English.
It is a wrong assumption. A pupil who is exposed to English only in upper primary is unlikely to develop sufficient English language abilities like their counterparts who started from Primary One.
This follows the pupils up to Primary Seven as the PLE performance has shown. Pupils in urban schools who start learning in English from Primary One outperformed their rural counterparts in all subjects by far. These urban children remain ahead of their rural counterparts even during secondary education and again outperform the rural children in Uganda Certificate of Education examinations at Senior Four and later A-Level.
Besides, it’s these same pupils who perform poorly in PLE because of the shaky English language background who in turn perform poorly at O-Level and join teachers colleges as their better performing counterparts proceed to A-Level and other institutions of higher learning. They return later from college to teach in primary schools. Such teachers cannot interpret a thematic curriculum as NCDC expects them to. No amount of in-service training can redeem their linguistic and intellectual abilities to the required level of competence to comprehend the curriculum and give pupils the appropriate learning skills and knowledge.
The issue: Curriculum
Our view: The 2007 curriculum should be reviewed. Government must stop pretence, go back to the drawing board and work out a meaningful and practical curriculum that improves both pupils’ and teachers’ competencies.
