The process of the development of a toolkit to support pre-service teachers' understanding and presentation of length in mathematics classroom.

Abstract

South African learners perform poorly in mathematics, throughout all the school phases. The training of teachers, especially in the primary school level, has been identified as one of the contributing factors. When pre-service teachers leave training institutions, they are not adequately prepared to teach the mathematical content in the grades for which they have been trained. Added to this is the challenge of insufficient or inadequate material for them to competently teach various topics in the mathematics curriculum. The discrepancy in the material used by South African teacher training institutions to prepare the primary school teachers exacerbates the challenge and calls for the development of relevant material to facilitate the teaching of mathematics with understanding. This paper reports on the process of developing a toolkit for teaching length to intermediate phase learners. Recommendations are also made on possible steps to follow, for other teachers to develop similar toolkits.