The n-Category Café

Re: Free High School Science Texts Needs You!

Re: Free High School Science Texts Needs You!

When you say “the current crop of textbooks we have”, is there a nationally-determined set of school texts?

No, I think schools are free to select the textbooks they want (in line with the curriculum!). In maths I think Classroom mathematics is pretty popular. But I think for a number of reasons the teachers (and to an extent the textbooks themselves) have been more-and-more forced to promote a “this is the formula for solving a problem like this” approach. I guess it’s the same all over the world.

In SA, it’s been exacerbated by the fact that they did away with “Higher grade” and “Standard grade” maths in high school, and replaced it with “Mathematics” and “Mathematical literacy”. The trouble is that, while most people should actually be doing “Mathematical literacy” (which has a nicely designed curriculum - maths for everyday life after school), it is seen as a “lower-grade” subject and so the outcome has been that there has been a huge increase in the amount of people doing the “Mathematics” course (which replaced “higher grade” maths). I quote from a 2008 report from Umalusi, the official examinations watchdog:

Second, the original research questions were based on the assumption that learners participating in the two subjects are similar or comparable. This assumption was not necessarily true, as what were probably the majority of learners enrolled for Mathematical Literacy would not necessarily have taken up Mathematics at all. Historically, approximately 60% of Senior Certificate learners enrolled for Mathematics; approximately 9% of the Senior Certificate candidates registered for Mathematics Higher Grade and 51% at Standard Grade level. The remaining 40% of the Senior Certificate candidates did not register for Mathematics at any level (see Department of Education annual reports on the Senior Certificate exams, for example, Department of Education 2006 and 2007).

The NSC requires learners to enrol for either Mathematics or Mathematical Literacy as one of their seven subjects. Based on figures supplied by the Department of Education (Vinjevold, personal communication, September 2008), it was anticipated that approximately 53% of the 2008 NSC Candidates would be writing Mathematics, and 47%, Mathematical Literacy. Rather than learners who had historically registered for Mathematics Standard Grade subsequently registering for Mathematical Literacy, it appeared that the vast majority of these learners had registered for Mathematics. It was estimated that only roughly 14% of the learners registered for Mathematical Literacy would historically have attempted some form of Mathematics (Higher or Standard Grade) at all. In other words, over 85% of the current NSC Mathematical Literacy learners would historically probably not have attempted any form of Mathematics as part of their Senior Certificates.

So, the “Mathematics” course has to cater for a huge spectrum of learners, and I guess the only way to cope is to present the material in a formula-based way, and to extensively “coach” the learners for the tests and exams.

The other trouble is that for some strange reason, the government did away with teacher-training colleges a few years back (reasoning that it wanted people to go to university instead), with the upshot being that we have a big shortfall in training teachers (especially maths and science ones)! But there is hope, there have been some good noises coming out of the education department in recent times. All this is hot air of course; I’m an academic at a university and not actually involved in high school education (I do have quite a few teacher friends of course but no doubt I get things mixed up).