Exploring performance of Grade 6 learners in the Mathematics Annual National Assessment in the Johannesburg South District

M.Ed. (Mathematics Education)Abstract: The year 2017 marks the 23rd year of democracy in the South African history. Despite more years of democracy and the ongoing changes in education policies, the South African education system is still faced with the ongoing challenges in its quest to provide quality education for all learners in rural and urban areas. Schools serving pupils from low socio-economic status communities continue to perform lower than the schools serving minority pupils from the affluent communities. The widening gap in learner performance particularly in numeracy and literacy between schools in low socio-economic status and wealthy communities is well documented (See Spaull, 2011; Taylor, Fleisch & Shindler, 2007; Spaull, 2013). Apart from perpetual inequality in performance between wealthy and schools in low socio-economic status communities, international assessments, SACMEQ, TIMMS, and MLA, reveals that the South African learners are outperformed by learners in developing countries that spend less on education and with the exception of a wealthy minority, most South African pupils cannot read, write and compute at grade-appropriate levels, with large proportions being functionally illiterate and innumerate (Spaull, 2013). The South Africa education is characterized as high cost but of low quality. Low performance of South African learners is not only rife in the international assessments. Nationally, performance of learners in the Annual National Assessment is well below the country’s set targets in mathematics and literacy. This study was aimed at exploring Grade 6 learners’ written work on Mathematics ANA in Gauteng Province in order to identify the common errors learners displayed as they were answering Grade 6 Mathematics ANA questions. Learners’ erroneous responses were analyzed guided by the literature and categorized under the following predetermined categories; conceptual errors, procedural errors, or carelessness errors. Learners made errors across all the five content area covered in the mathematics ANA paper. Some errors were found to be common amongst a group of learners and some errors varied from one individual learner to another. The findings in this study revealed that some of the common errors were due to common misconceptions held by learners. The study also revealed that some learners resorted into merely writing responses with no discernible link to what the items required..