Cause Of Failure In Mathematics

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South Africa has a huge shortage of skilled workers in various fields such as engineering, applied sciences, accountancy, architecture, medicine and law. Mathematics is a requirement for entry in these careers to enable learners to grasp the content of several subjects in these disciplines. “South African has failed to produce learners who are competent. In the present paper the causes of failure of mathematics in school is investigated.” Meier (2011) In a research article by Kalhotra in 2013, there was a question addressed for guiding the study. The focus of the investigation was to identify the cause of failure in mathematics among students in term of educational level of parents, parental income, help of parents in domestic work, school …show more content…

Internal factors were as follows: learners attributed their failure in mathematics to the lack of hard working or laziness in some of them and lack of interest in the subject of mathematics because it’s perceived as difficult. Therefore the results support both the external causes of failure and internal causes of failure in …show more content…

In South Africa there are enormous numbers of failures in mathematics especially in the Eastern Cape. After researching this topic and having a close look at the gathered results, mathematics and physical science have been are major problems in this country. Teachers are blaming each other for that as the many can agree that the major cause to failure of mathematics is the lack of knowledge of content, lack of qualified teachers or the government for not supplying their schools with quality curriculum to deal with the subject. On the other hand the government points the fingers at the teachers for not dealing with the content correctly and being too lazy to teach mathematics ultimately making the learners have the bad attitude towards the subject. This has been an on-going debate for many years and it is clear that the cause of failure in mathematics has many facets and is extremely complex. The real question is whether it is fixable or not? The answer is completely dependent on the decisions of the education department, teachers and parents on whether they want to create mediocre or exceptional

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