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Kenya's language-in-education policy supports mother-tongue education as the ideal approach to developing language and literacy skills of young learners. The policy has been informed by findings of various past national education commissions as well as international declarations such as the UNESCO declaration on the use of Vernacular Languages in Education of 1953, the World Declaration on Education for All of 1990 and the Dakar framework of 2000. The country's Constitution of 2010...

There is a growing public concern in Kenya over the persistent gap between those schools that are consistently ranked at the top and those ranked at the bottom of the annual Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) examination league tables. This has raised the issue of inequality in educational opportunity. Our primary concern in this paper is to understand some of the classroom-school factors that may explain the persistent differences in achievement between the top and bottom...

This paper reports research on the initial teacher training and continuing professional development of teachers in six African countries (Ghana, Kenya, Mali, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda). The focus of the research was on the teaching of early reading and mathematics. The curriculum of both these areas was analysed in terms of (i) implementation by providers such as Colleges of Education, and (ii) impact in schools. The study found that there were many and deep gaps in the curriculum taught...

The present paper investigates students' experiences of being multilingual. Qualitative data have been collected during observation, focus groups, interviews and text writing in a public primary school in rural Kenya. The informants are students in standards one, three and eight whose mother tongue is the indigenous language called Nandi, which all these students use at home and with friends. The school languages are Swahili and English, and the use of Nandi is forbidden in school except in...

Over the past decade, international and national education agencies have begun to emphasize the improvement of the quality (rather than quantity) of education in developing countries. This trend has been paralleled by a significant increase in the use of educational assessments as a way to measure gains and losses in quality of learning. As interest in assessment has grown, low-income countries have begun to adopt and adapt international and other assessments for a variety of uses, including...

The Dialectics of African Education and Western Discourses" addresses how continental Africans who have worked or are currently working in the Canadian academy address their dual legacy of African and Euro-American knowledge paradigms. Reflecting a range of approaches to hegemonic Euro-American paradigms that can be summarized as "appropriation, ambivalence and alternatives," the authors bring African indigenous knowledge and praxes into play in addressing issues in various sub-fields of...

Teaching method is a major factor that affects students' motivation to learn physics. This study investigated the effects of using mastery learning approach (MLA) on secondary school students' motivation to learn physics. Solomon four non-equivalent control group design under the quasi-experimental research method was used in which a random sample of 4 co-educational secondary schools was obtained in Kieni East Division of Nyeri District in Kenya. The 4 schools were randomly put into 4...

This article examines household-level social capital as a determinant of children's schooling using a cross-sectional data of the 2001 Cameroon Household Survey. Reduced form demand equations of schooling for the entire sample, male and female children are estimated separately. Results indicate that parent's education and income strongly influence parental decisions towards a child's schooling. However, social capital, especially in the female dimension, is more important as both male and...

This study investigated the perceptions of 99 youth from two Samburu, Kenya primary schools about the benefits and impacts of nearby wildlife-based protected areas. Participants responded in writing to two questions which the researchers coded to identify key themes. Building on prior work with youth in the Maasai region of Kenya and adults in Samburu, the study revealed that most youth perceived parks as providing economic benefits related to tourism, showed limited understanding of the...

This study includes a critical inquiry into literacy education that takes into account constraints to literacy such as health; an engagement with mothers as the primary caregivers and literacy models for their children; and guidelines for developing literacy interventions that move beyond entrenched modes of thought to promote additive approaches to forming literacy. In this mixed methods study, quantitative reading data from 800-second graders in 40 schools from the U.S.-funded Early Grade...

The article reports on the plan of Worldreader, a nonprofit organization aimed at creating reading culture in developing countries through the use of electronic-books (e-books) and electronic-readers (e-readers), to expand its efforts in Kilgoris, Kenya starting May 2011. The organization, which was launched in 2009 by David Risher, Colin McElwee and Mike Sundermeyer, will provide Kindles and e-books to the Intimigon Nursery and Primary School. Information on the achievements and financial status of Worldreader is also given.

The backwash of testing on teaching can be positive or negative. This article is based on the findings of a study carried out in Kenya on strengthening the development of literacy in English among primary school children, which established that the learners performed poorly on skills that were not directly tested in the conventional examinations. Interventions used in improving teaching, learning, and assessment to target communicative competence are discussed in the article. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

This study was carried out with 276 standard eight pupils in eleven primary schools in the rural town of Narok in Kenya's Rift Valley. It evaluated their awareness of key environmental issues in their local area and their knowledge about the causes, effects and solutions pertaining to these environmental issues. A descriptive research design was used and data was collected using the Pupils' Environmental Education Questionnaire (PEEQ). The study found that most pupils were aware of the key...

This study examined standard 6 and 8 (Standards 6 and 8 are the sixth and eighth years, respectively, of primary level schooling in Kenya.) students’ perceptions of how they use mathematics and science outside the classroom in an attempt to learn more about students’ everyday mathematics and science practice. The knowledge of students’ everyday mathematics and science practice may assist teachers in helping students be more powerful mathematically and scientifically both in doing mathematics...

We advance three propositions in this paper. First, teaching international business (IB) at any level needs to be theoretically driven, using mainstream frameworks to organize thinking. Second, these frameworks need to be made relevant to the experiences of the students; for example, by using them in case studies. Third, these parameters of rigor and relevance need to be seamlessly integrated. We then demonstrate these principles using Rugman's CSA-FSA matrix, describing both the theoretical and practical value of the framework.

Similar concerns about the development of children's creative writing abilities in Kenya and South Africa prompted two Mother Tongue (MT) education practitioners in Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) and Molteno Institute for Language and Literacy of Linguistics (MILL) to undertake parallel intervention studies to increase teachers' competence in writing pedagogy and improve the quantity and quality of learners' writing. Most early literacy teachers have had no experience themselves of...

This study was an ethnographic case study that investigated oral and written language learning in a first grade classroom in Kenya. The languages used in this classroom were Swahili and English only. Kamba the mother tongue of the majority of the children, was banned in the entire school. In this classroom there were 89 children with two teachers, one a teacher of English, the other a teacher of Swahili. The children's ages ranged from five to eight years. The main participants were six...

Of great importance to policy makers is to know if females and poor households benefit more or less than the males or rich households from an expansion in access to public education. This is marginal benefit incidence of public spending which is rarely determined. In this paper, we determine the extent to which an expansion in public education is effective in reducing gender gaps in enrollments and thus, poverty in Cameroon. Government subsidies directed towards higher education are poorly...

The backwash of testing on teaching can be positive or negative. This article is based on the findings of a study carried out in Kenya on strengthening the development of literacy in English among primary school children, which established that the learners performed poorly on skills that were not directly tested in the conventional examinations. Interventions used in improving teaching, learning, and assessment to target communicative competence are discussed in the article. (Contains 2 tables.)