Globalisation And Primary Education Development In Tanzania: Prospects And Challenges

1. Overview of the Country and Primary Education System:
Tanzania covers 945,000 square kilometres, including approximately 60,000 square kilometres of inland water. The school system is a 2-7-4-2-3+ consisting of pre-primary, primary school, ordinary level secondary education, Advanced level secondary, Technical and Higher Education. Primary School Education is compulsory whereby parents are supposed to take their children to school for enrollment. In the education sector, this goal was translated into the 1974 Universal Primary Education Movement, whose goal was to make primary education universally available, compulsory, and provided free of cost to users to ensure it reached the poorest. By the beginning of the 1980s, each village in Tanzania had a primary school and gross primary school enrollment reached nearly 100 percent, although the quality of education provided was not very high. From 1996 the education sector proceeded through the launch and operation of Primary Education Development Plan - PEDP in 2001 to date.

Learning Strategies

Author: Daniel J. Boudah and Kevin J. O'Neill
Date: August 1999

What are Learning Strategies?

As students shift from the skills emphasis of elementary grades to the content emphasis of secondary grades, they face greater demands to read information from textbooks, take notes from lectures, work independently, and express understanding in written compositions and on paper and pencil tests (Schumaker & Deshler, 1984). For students who haven't acquired such important academic skills, the task of mastering content often comes with failure, particularly in inclusive general education classes. In response to this challenge, many students with learning problems, including those with learning disabilities (LD), have acquired and use specific learning strategies to become successful despite their knowledge and skill deficits.

Simply put, a learning strategy is an individual's approach to complete a task. More specifically, a learning strategy is an individual's way of organizing and using a particular set of skills in order to learn content or accomplish other tasks more effectively and efficiently in school as well as in nonacademic settings (Schumaker & Deshler, 1992). Therefore, teachers who teach learning strategies teach students how to learn, rather than teaching them specific curriculum content or specific skills.

What Does the Research Say about Learning Strategies?