Uprooting bad mathematical performance: pilot study into roots of problems

South African students score poorly in mathematics and language tests when compared with students from other African countries and when compared with what should be expected 14 years after the achievement of democracy. But Martin Carnoy, Linda Chisholm and Hlengani Baloyi believe it is critically important to go beyond simply measuring low achievement and to find ways of diagnosing learning problems with a view to enabling correction and remediation.