Balancing Structured Teacher Support and Autonomy to Improve Numeracy Outcomes: Lessons from Kenya

• In Event: Foundational mathematics programs at scale: Affordances and challenges

Proposal

Numeracy outcomes remain low in Kenya. Only 4 out of 10 learners in Grade 4 are proficient in grade 3 level operation tasks. In grade 6, this proportion increases slightly to 5 out of 10, implying that half of the learners in school exit the primary education cycle without basic proficiency in Grade 3 Math tasks (Usawa, 2024). Even though girls outperform boys across most counties, regional disparities are prevalent where learners in poor, urban informal settlements, rural and marginalized counties perform dismally low compared to the national average.
Reasons behind this could be varied. In a recent diagnostic which sought to establish the teachers' mathematics knowledge and how this impacts instructional practice, it emerged that overall, only 5% of early grade Math teachers could correctly align instructional strategies with content and learning levels of children. For instance, only 46% of teachers correctly identified ‘counting all’ as the initial strategy learners would use to solve simple addition tasks (Zizi Afrique, 2025). Such shortfalls in pedagogical content knowledge imply that classroom practice may not always align to the needs of learners, consequently affecting conceptual mastery and procedural fluency. Moreso, a lack of structured instructional approach and textbooks that offer minimal (to no) guidance to teachers on sequencing of concepts significantly affect numeracy learning.
This presentation draws insights from numeracy research on teacher practice, teacher mathematical knowledge, implementation and a consultative co-creation process with the Government on a structured intervention to improve teacher practice and subsequently, learner outcomes. In resource constrained environments like Kenya where production of workbooks and scripted lesson plans for every teacher may not be sustainable in the long run, exploring the use of supplementary, strongly aligned numeracy TLMs offers a promising alternative.
The presentation draws from learner assessments to situate the overall trends in numeracy outcomes and present an analysis of the most common misconceptions and errors among grade 3 learners. It will also explore how teachers' levels of mathematical knowledge facilitate or hinder effective teaching in early grade numeracy classrooms and share lessons of impact when teachers receive targeted classroom support to improve lesson planning and choice of teaching strategies. Initial findings from a 6-month intervention showed an increase in learners' levels of conceptual mastery. Based on lessons from implementation, we recommend targeted teacher training programs (in-service), stronger peer support and feedback mechanisms as well as aligned instructional resources balanced with teacher autonomy to improve teaching practices.

Author

• Virginia Wanjiru Ngindiru, Zizi Afrique Foundation