The Learning Crisis in Africa: The Teachers Who Can’t Read (PART II)
This is part two of the teaching and learning crisis in Africa. In a previous post, I showed how African children go through school and come out without basic knowledge of mathematics and language. You can read more about it here.
In this post, I will discuss an even bigger problem in African schools. A World Bank report that surveyed 24,000 students and 21,000 teachers from more than 2,600 schools across Sub-Saharan Africa established that many teachers in Africa not only lacked the necessary content knowledge of the subjects they teach, but also lacked the skills needed to teach. In other words, many teachers surveyed could not solve simple math or grammar problems drawn from the curriculum they teach. In cases where a teacher could solve the problems, he faced significant difficulties teaching it to the students.
The survey was quite unique since unlike other studies that evaluate teachers based on tests, this study asked teachers to mark students’ work. The researchers would then evaluate whether the teacher marked all the answers correctly. For example, the researchers would pick random questions in the curriculum that the teacher was teaching, give it to the students, then ask the teacher to mark. The researchers would then go through the transcripts and see whether the teacher marked all the questions correctly. This method was used to assess both math and language teachers.
The assessment criteria were also quite simple and straightforward. A teacher was deemed knowledgeable of the content if he scored above 80% in the subject he teaches. The other 20% was ruled out as the margin of error. With such a benchmark, a teacher only needed to mark a student’s work and score eighty percent in the assessment. Suffice to note that 90% of the teachers surveyed had either a secondary education or higher. Moreover, only teachers who taught class four at the time of the study, or had taught class three in the previous year were surveyed.
The findings were interesting and varied from country to country. More than 90% of Ugandan and Kenyan teachers had content mastery of the subject they teach. That means most of them managed to mark more than 80% of the questions in the language test correctly. In Nigeria, only 25% of the teachers had basic knowledge in the subject they teach.
However, a teacher needs to know more than what the student knows, that’s why they are teachers. A teacher who teaches class four needs to know more than class four work. Therefore, inasmuch as most teachers met the 80% benchmark for subject content knowledge, nuance was added by introducing more challenging questions from higher grades. For example, while the initial test only involved simple spelling and grammar questions, the new test introduced a cloze test and a written letter. In Kenya, students do the cloze test in the first fifteen questions in all English and Kiswahili exams beginning class four. The cloze test and the letter were supposed to measure whether the teacher can correctly identify mistakes made by a student in a cloze test, or grammatical mistakes in a written letter. Like the previous test, the teachers were only required to mark a student’s work and score 80%.
In this new test format, only 7% of teachers across Sub-Saharan Africa were able to meet the required threshold for minimum subject content. The results of this assessment also varied by country with only 34% of Kenyan teachers successfully demonstrating knowledge in the subject they teach. Let me flip the coin so that we can get the full magnitude of the problem. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 93% of the teachers did not have sufficient knowledge of the language subject they teach. In Kenya alone, 66% of the teachers did not have the content knowledge of the English curriculum they teach in class four. Even worse, no teacher in Togo, Mozambique, Nigeria, or Tanzania demonstrated minimum knowledge in the language subject they teach.
Can you spell the word traffic? Well, 14% of class four teachers could not. What about filling the blank in the question below?
“[ ______] [Who, How much, How many] oranges do you have?”
Since most of the questions required a teacher to mark already filled cloze tests, many could not correct the mistake in this sentence:
“[Where] do I have to go to the market?” The correct answer is “why” or “when.”
The problem persists in mathematics where class four teachers were required to mark simple math questions. In a more challenging assessment, math story problems and logical puzzles were added. Many class four teachers (77%) met the minimum score needed to demonstrate that they understood the content of the simple math curriculum. The results also varied by country with fewer teachers in Nigeria (60%) being able to demonstrate content knowledge of class four math. In Mozambique, 40% of the teachers could not multiply double digit numbers. The overall Sub-Saharan average of teachers who could not multiply two digit numbers was 32%.
A simple math story problem was more challenging to the teachers in general, with only half of the teachers surveyed meeting the threshold. In Togo, however, 70% of the teachers did not give the right answer to such a problem. Only 14% of the teachers in Sub-Saharan Africa could solve an advanced math story problem and very few if any teachers in most African countries could interpret the information given in a Venn diagram.
*One in ten teachers in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot add two digit numbers.
From what we have seen above, the state of education in Africa is serious. If a teacher cannot answer most of the questions in the subject he teaches, then it raises a lot of questions. One question is whether a teacher of that caliber can teach or even create a lesson plan if he himself is unable to correctly answer some of the questions. Teaching requires the teacher to be well versed with various teaching skills. For example, a teacher ought to know how to assess a student’s ability, grade a student, and give appropriate feedback. If a student makes a math error, the teacher should be able to correct and guide the student on the best way to approach the problem. In most of Sub Saharan Africa, many teachers cannot do that.
Teachers, for example, were asked to read a passage then design a lesson plan created using content from the passage. They needed to organize questions, mix them up to include questions with different levels of difficulty, have questions requiring students to remember what they read, and to include questions requiring students to apply the information they’ve learnt into different contexts. These skills are essential for a teacher to be efficient on the job. However, many teachers in Africa could not do that. Many cannot adequately assess a student and give relevant feedback. Moreover, many teachers could not infer trends from raw data. For example, many teachers could not do an average of a student’s performance, or come up with a chart showing the trends in student performance over time. Many teachers could not teach or properly draw lesson plans despite the fact that these are important skills for a teacher to have. Teaching and assessment skills enable the teacher to know whether students are learning or not. Otherwise, its pure guess work and Africa ends up with a large number of people who went to school but did not learn anything.
What are the reasons for such dismal performances among teachers in Africa? There’s no easy answer; however, it can be argued that as African governments rushed to increase school enrollment, little was done to ensure that the teachers hired were of the best quality. For example, ask yourself what’s the process of becoming a teacher in your country. What are the qualifications, and what does the government do to ensure that teachers meet those qualifications? What about teacher performance? Is there a way of assessing a teacher’s performance?
In this survey, most teachers had either a secondary education or higher education degree. The troubling question that arises is, why would high school and college graduates find considerable difficulties answering simple math and grammar problems? A few hypotheses can be drawn: High school and graduate students in Sub Saharan Africa do not know simple grammar and basic math. Another hypothesis is that; the cognitive abilities of the average Sub-Saharan African is a huge impediment to his gain and transfer of knowledge.
As for the former hypothesis, Kenyan nurses with undergraduate degrees failed to secure NHS jobs in the UK after failing a simple English test. As for the latter, Sub Saharan Africa has an average IQ of 68.9, which is a few standard deviations below the European average IQ of 100, and the Asian average IQ of 105. Kenya has a measured average IQ of 75.20. Since the future of Africa depends on how we educate our children, we have to deal with the learning and teaching crises in Africa.
That’s part two of the learning and teaching crisis in Africa. In a different post, I will do a part three that evaluates the differences in student and teacher performance between students who attend private schools and those that attend public schools in Sub-Saharan Africa. Is there any difference between students and teachers in private and public schools? That’s the question I will be trying to answer.
If you have not read part one of this series, you can get it here.
Reference
Bold, T., Filmer, D., Martin, G., Molina, E., Rockmore, C., Stacy, B., … & Wane, W. (2017). What do teachers know and do? Does it matter? Evidence from primary schools in Africa. Does it Matter? https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2906568.
