Teachers' strategies for teaching mulitiplication and division to grade 3 and 4 learners in Western Province,Zambia

The purpose of this study was to interview and observe primary school teachers teaching
multiplication and division to grade 3 and 4 learners in Western Province, Zambia. This was
done in order to understand the strategies that they employ and to identify the challenges they
may be encountering for possible curriculum enrichment in schools. Learning of mathematics
is still a challenge to most of the learners in Zambia as evidenced from mathematics
continuously recording poor performance over the years Ministry of General Education
(MoGE, 2015) indicates that the overall performance in mathematics has remained low over
the years and since 1999 the National Mean has remained below 40 percent for grade 5. Five
grade 3 and 4 classes were conveniently selected, two class teachers for both grade 3 and 4
from the selected five schools (two schools from Mongu and three from Sioma). The two
grades were chosen because this is the time when pupils begin to learn concepts and
strategies to solve multiplication and division and assumed that strategies used may be the
cause of low performance. The districts were convenient to the researcher. In order to collect
in-depth information, interviews and observations were carried out and data was qualitatively
analysed. The findings of the study suggested that teachers and learners had challenges in
teaching and learning multiplication and division due to strategies used. This is because the
strategies used have limited view as such they may have future challenges in learning
mathematics because multiplication and division are key topics in mathematics education.
The findings further show that most of the teachers introduced multiplication and division as
repeated addition, regrouping and multiplication table was also used as a strategy when
teaching. This gap created at this level might affect performance in higher grades. Despite the
challenges observed, the study argues that there is potential to overcome these challenges and
concludes by recommending; that teaching of multiplication and division should be done in a
way that could build a strong foundation at grassroots level. For instance helping learners
master the multiplication table especially for digits 0-9 is very critical in the learning of
multiplication and division. A longitudinal research to prove the claim should be carried out
and write books guiding teachers on how to teach for conceptual understanding.