Quantitative Developments, Quality and Equity Concerns in Zimbabwean Primary and Secondary Education Sectors.

A journal article.Whilst Zimbabwe has achieved significant quantitative developments in education, little has been achieved in providing equal access to quality education in the whole education sector. The poor communities continue to struggle on with poor teacher quality, inadequate instructional materials, and poor school facilities. Gender discrimination is on the increase with less, female students attending school and with more of this small group dropping out of school. The quality of education has significantly declined and this signals a serious potential problem of high illiteracy levels, especially among women

A Comparative Analysis Of Student Achievement By School Type In Zimbabwe Secondary Schools

A ZJER comparative analysis of student performance by school type in Zimbabwe.The purpose of this study was to determine statistical differences in levels of student performance in ZJC English and Mathematics between six secondary school types in Zimbabwe. 5293 Form 2 students who wrote ZJC examinations in 33 secondary schools in 1989 participated in the study. As predicted, students in high fee paying schools performed better in both English and Mathematics than students in former group A, former group B (urban and rural), mission and rural district council schools. While students in former group A schools performed better in English than students in mission, former group B (urban and rural), and rural district council schools, the situation in Mathematics was different. Students in mission schools performed significantly better in Mathematics than their counterparts in former group A schools who performed significantly better than students in former group B (urban and rural) and rural district council schools. Evidence from the study shows that students in former group B urban schools performed significantly better in English than students in former group B urban schools contrary to the postulated prediction. A startling finding was that rural district council schools performed in Mathematics as well as former group B urban schools despite the critical shortages in human, financial and instructional resources constraining them

The School Head as an Instructional Leader in Zimbabwe Secondary Schools

A Zimbabwe Journal of Educational Research (ZJER) article.This paper presents evidence obtained from a survey of secondary school heads in government schools, church schools, and rural day schools about functions performed by those heads, characteristics of secondary school heads and problems constraining heads from discharging their duties effectively and efficiently. The evidence shows that: 1. The majority of rural secondary schools are administered by inexperienced and lowly qualified and untrained heads who also' have heavy teaching loads. 2. The majority of school heads possess minimal or no knowledge in technical subjects, a situation which appears not supportive of the implementation of the policy of vocationalization of secondary school education. 3. While the thrust in secondary school education is on technical education, school heads do not consider the training of students in technical fields as a top priority for secondary schools. To the contrary, heads consider character building and preparation for post-secondary programmes as top priorities for secondary schools. 4. Secondary school heads devote most of their time on administrative duties thereby neglecting the critical activities in the curriculum and instructional domains

Attained mathematics curriculum in Zimbabwe primary schools

A ZJER article on the attained mathematics curriculum of primary schools in Zimbabwe.This article presents a research on the attained mathematics curriculum in Zimbabwe primary schools conducted in 1981. The major findings are that: (i) The majority of Grade Seven pupils proceed into the secondary school level with very limited mathematical background, especially in those areas that constitute the foundation for secondary school mathematics. (ii) The majority of Grade Seven pupils show very weak understanding of key mathematical concepts such as number, fraction, place value, perimeter, area, and volume. (iii) The Grade Seven pupils’ levels of competence in the key processes of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are very low especially in problems involving combinations of whole numbers, proper and improper fractions, decimals and mixed numbers. (iv) Most Grade Seven pupils show very low ability to apply mathematical ideas to real life problems even those involving practical concepts such as gain, loss, interest, discount and sales tax