Following the dismal performance of students this year in Mathematics at CXC, CARICOM leaders have put the issue up for discussion at their next meeting and President Irfaan Ali has ordered that immediate remedial measures be rolled out in schools across the country.
“The issue of mathematics has now captured the attention of every single head of state and Prime Minister in the region, and it is now an agenda for the heads of government in CARICOM. That is to tell you the issues and challenges that we face. It is not a Jamaica issue, Barbados issue, Trinidad, or a Guyana issue… it has now become a collective issue that we must address,” President Irfaan Ali yesterday said at the opening of the Yarrowkabra Secondary School, Soesdyke-Linden Highway.
“And here in Guyana, we have to be innovative. I believe that we have to look at how varied scenarios have affected our results in mathematics… so I’ve asked the Minister of Education not to wait on the heads of government for us to do some introspection, and to look globally at what is available as tools, to help us to overcome this challenge. There’s some important tools that we can utilise instantaneously, and that is why we are investing,” he added.
Mathematics continues to be the albatross around students’ necks with only 36 per cent managing to pass this year and it has seen pass rates fluctuating between 34 and 43 per cent from 2021 to 2023.
Ali assured that government is not taking these failures lightly and opined that much analysis is needed to find the deep-rooted problem and for this country to find innovative methods to foster the development of mathematics skillsets and a liking for the subject by students.
“We have to look at how varied scenarios have affected our results in mathematics, because mathematics calls for more analytical thinking, more problem solving, type of approach, whether our education system, our teaching delivery, whether our teaching delivery is effective enough to deal with what mathematics requires, whether our children are shying away from the problem-solving mode of mathematics, whether there’s an inbuilt fear of mathematics that is manifested in a psychological performance, or a way in which our students are approaching mathematics,” he reasoned.
“We also have to look at how we use creative opportunities, how we use new technology to deliver the best environment and the best methods through which we can have improvement in mathematics,” he added.
With students plunged abruptly into online learning for the two-year COVID-19 period, the possibility of this affecting the teaching of concepts must also be looked at.
Direct contact
“Now also COVID, because mathematics requires more direct contact, more group, more analytics, more teachers-to-student relationship, more teaching time. Whether COVID itself had a greater impact on students’ performance in mathematics than other subject areas [we don’t know] because you can read and follow in other subject areas, but in mathematics you need to have a more problem-solving approach. You have to do formulas, understand formulas, and understand analytics. That can be also an offshoot of the problem of COVID, the curriculum and the mode of delivery,” he said.
To prepare students for the current global technological era while bringing their grade percentages up in academic disciplines, Ali said this country wants to produce critical thinkers who are equipped with life learning skillsets. It is to this end that the President emphasised that his administration will be investing heavily in the digitisation of education. “The digitisation of our textbooks, the digitisation of our teaching material, the digitisation of our learning material, digitisation of our delivery…,” he said.
“Important in a digitisation platform is eLearning and online education. We have about three proposals now that we are examining that deals with online education. How is it 24 hours every day, we can place our schools, our students, in a classroom scenario, in an education scenario, in a learning environment, getting the best resource that we have nationally, putting those resources in a digital format, and delivering online education so that there are no gaps, so that areas where there are imbalances, where there are differences in skill sets,” he added.
He posited that ways have to also be looked at to cater for differing levels of both teaching and how children learn. “We are human beings. All of us can’t be the same. All of us can’t have the same delivery style. All of us can’t be good in one subject area. There will be some among us who are better in a particular area, but we have to see how we can utilise that better … infuse it into a national programme, and disseminate it across the learning platform. And that is what the technology would allow us to do,” he stressed.
Ali said that he was passionate about education because without an educated nation, this country cannot develop at the pace it holds the potential for and that when he speaks of educational development, building of schools is only a small subset of an overall plan.
“Let me also say today it is easy for us to be misguided. We are here celebrating education, not the building alone, because the infrastructure is just one component of delivering higher quality education… we can have the best environment, we can have the best facilities, but if we also do not invest in the human resources that would help these facilities to manifest the type of results that we’re investing for then we will have a mismatch. We’ll have a mismatch between facility and human resources,” he said.
“And we must also acknowledge that we are working in a changing environment. That is why today, outside of building infrastructure and facilities, we are investing in our teachers. We are investing in having higher quality teachers and we are seeing that more of our teachers are becoming graduates, graduate teachers having first degrees, master’s degrees, and even PhDs,” he added.
Meanwhile, Minister of Education Priya Manickchand said that government shows its commitment to fostering quality education through action and not words.
“The only sure way we know to change your life, the only sure way we know to make sure your children have a life better than yours; less struggle and not living a life of want, is to educate them. That is the only sure way we know. That is why President Ali is investing in education… all over this country,” she said.
She noted that currently, some 26 secondary schools are to be built countrywide.
“When we make promises, we keep them… when we say we love you, it is not a joke. We show you it in action because love for us is a verb. Love is an action word so love must come with more for you and your family and your villages and your communities,” she added.
