The Ministry of Education and Youth will be employing tactical strategies during the current academic year, aimed at improving student performance in mathematics.

During the last sitting of the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) external examinations, only 39 per cent of Jamaican students received a passing grade in maths.

According to Dr Kasan Troupe, permanent secretary in the ministry, the approach will include extended learning opportunities for students and teacher support.

“How that will unpack this year is that we have gone into the 245 schools, and this includes 56 secondary-level institutions, and we have pulled out their data in terms of their performance.

“We have looked to see how they rolled out their learning programme in terms of the time allotted on the timetable to execute the syllabus for the assessments that they do, and we are going to be helping our schools to do that differently,” said Troupe.

She was addressing the recent Education Transformation Oversight Committee (ETOC) press conference held at The University of the West Indies (The UWI) Regional Headquarters in St Andrew.

Troupe shared that according to the CSEC mathematics syllabus, 3.3 hours are required weekly for its completion in two years.

“We have not done that well. When we looked at some of our timetables, our students were not getting the fulsome experience. We also know that most of our learners do well because they go to private classes and extra lessons — that, in essence, is extended learning.

“What we will do is to bring that into the formal process by increasing the time on the timetable to five hours of mathematics per week in these project schools that we are working with,” added Troupe.

She said the ministry has also developed QR codes, which will be mounted at bus stops and other areas frequented by students.

“They can scan and get practice questions right where they are. So, there is learning on the go when they are travelling, so they can maximise time-on-task,” she said, while urging students to embrace self-directed learning.

Troupe said the ministry will also be hosting face-to-face and virtual camps organised by mathematics coaches and specialists.

“We are also looking at assessing our maths teachers. The commission challenged us to pull the data of the number of teachers we have available to us, come up with a categorisation of these teachers — those who are trained, those who have demonstrated excellence in the pass rate of learners versus those who are untrained or those who are not suitably deployed. We have put together a tool kit [in terms of] what these teachers will get as support to improve maths,” Troupe added.

She indicated that this approach will also include common planning time and use of artificial intelligence.