Teacher Education And Acquisition Of Numeracy Skills By Pre-Primary School Pupils In Kinondoni District, Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania

ABSTRACT

Numeracy skills enable logical reasoning, which leads to better comprehension of the world around us. Developing a mentally organized way of thinking is critical for the holistic development of children. To make this happen, there is need to provide high-quality numeracy education at an early age. In Tanzania, the level of numeracy achievement at the lower primary school continues to linger way below the average despite the efforts by the Tanzania government through provision of financial support to the education sector. This situation comes at a time when numeracy achievements are appreciated globally for its role in the national and even global development. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between teacher education and numeracy achievement in the pre-primary level. The study was guided by five objectives; to find out whether the duration of teacher training, the level of teacher training, the curriculum used in training the pre-primary teachers and the mode of teacher-training influences the pre-primary pupils' numeracy achievements. This study was grounded on Lev Vygotsky’s Social cultural and employed mixed methods research design where descriptive survey and correlational research designs were used. The dependent variable was pre-primary pupils’ numeracy achievement and the independent variable was teacher education. The study was conducted in Kinondoni, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The target population was both public and private pre-primary schools in the district. Purposeful, stratified, simple random and systematic sampling techniques were employed. The sample included; 16 pre-primary schools, 160 pupils and 16 pre-primary teachers. Self-constructed numeracy tests for pupils and questionnaires for pre-primary teachers are the research instruments that this study used. Content validity was used to ensure the validity of the instruments while split-half technique was used to determine the reliability of the instrument. Inferential and descriptive statistics were used to summarize and analyze the data. The Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was used to test the null hypotheses at a significance level of 0.05. Post Hoc tests were ran to confirm where the differences occurred between groups. The findings of this study revealed pupils taught by Diploma teachers performed better than all the others. Pupils taught by Montessori trained teachers outperformed their counterparts taught by other teachers. Further, ODEL trained teachers registered the highest numeracy achievement. The study recommended development of policies that guide on the harmonization of the curriculum used for training, orientation workshops on the implementation of the new curriculum, Diploma training for all pre-primary teachers and incorporation of key elements of Montessori curriculum in the other curricula used to train pre-primary teachers to maximize learning.