Pre-Service preparation of Mathematics Teachers for secondary schools: A study of the perception of the Mathematics Teachers in Konoin Sub county, Bomet County, Kenya.

Abstract

Performance in mathematics has become a matter of concern to stakeholders in education and even the general public .Various factors have been attributed to this, one of them being the quality of the teacher‘s teaching the subject. The quality of mathematics teachers has been questioned on the grounds that mathematics teachers display Poor understanding of basic mathematics concepts, are unable to solve some mathematical problems given by students ,are skipping some topics and performing poorly in teaching skills. Mathematics teacher preparation has been blamed for this, with allegations that the training programme is inadequate leading to unsatisfactory performance by the mathematics teachers. This study, therefore, sought to investigate secondary school mathematics teachers‘ perception on their pre-service training. The study was conducted in Konoin sub county of Bomet County, Kenya. The study examined the teachers‘ perceptions on the relevance of the subject content, the teaching methodology course units taught, the micro teaching and the teaching practice in preparing them to teach in secondary schools. The study was guided by Pedagogical content knowledge model as espoused by education spsychologist Lee Shulman (1987). The study adopted a descriptive survey design. Stratified sampling was used in categorizing the schools into county, sub county and private. Simple random sampling was used to select the schools from where the HOD participated in the study. Data was collected using questionnaires, interview schedule and document analysis. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) computer programme was used to analyze the data. The analyzed data was presented as percentage frequencies and in tables. The research findings revealed that the mathematics content offered in the teacher training institutions is inadequate and largely irrelevant to the needs of the secondary school mathematics teachers. The general teaching methodology courses are adequate but the teaching methodology on the mathematics subject is not adequate. Micro teaching is well organized and helped the teachers practice all the teaching skills that they learned during the lectures and prepare them well for teaching practice. The teaching practice is appropriate but the number of times the trainees are supervised and the supervisor- trainee interaction is wanting. Basing on the findings, the researcher recommended that departments of mathematics in the universities should review their curriculum to make the content more relevant and adequate to the secondary school teachers needs, more time should be allocated to the subject methodology in mathematics, subject content should be taught concurrently with its methodology and finally more attention should be given to the supervision process and particularly the discussion of feedback during the teaching practice. Commission of University Education should also devise a way of ensuring that all teacher training institutions and particularly universities offer the same curricula in terms of the course content for the same subjects to ensure uniformity in the quality of their products (teachers). These recommendations are hoped to be useful to the Mathematics and Education Departments of teacher training institutions in improving the relevance of their programmes and Ministry of Education in formulating policies regarding teacher education. Educators, parents, and other stakeholders can use the findings to learn more about the teaching subject.