Browsing by Author "Mbise, Akundaeli Safari"

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    Screening and assessment for developmental and learning delays among young school-age children in Tanzania
    (University of Dar es Salaam, 1989) Mbise, Akundaeli Safari
    Developmental screening and assessment of pre-school and school children in Tanzania should be an integral part of childhood services. Research on early childhood education and stimulation in the family has indicated that children’s development and learning can be enhanced and handicapping conditions can be prevented. One area of great concern has been the importance of the family environment in early childhood development and learning, especially the role played by various family processes and interactions. The present study attempted to explore the developmental characteristics of young school-age children and the characteristics of their home environment in Tanzania. The intention was to identify children’s developmental strengths and symptoms of possible developmental problems. The home environment was analyzed for factors enhancing or inhibiting children’s development and learning. The five questions which guided the study sought to identify children’s current developmental and functional characteristics, family provisions supporting children’s development, whether the MPI and the JOME inventories differentiated children’s developmental functioning, and the characteristics of the home environment, whether the MPI and HOME were ecologically appropriate for screening and assessing children in Tanzania, and the extent to which the family helped children to develop school related skills. To address this problem, a cross-sectional design was employed to study 100 five and six year old children with mean ages of 59.2 months and 73.2 months, respectively, from five city locations in Dar Es Salaam. Children’s parents (100) provided information on (Children’s) developmental characteristics and functioning as represented in the MPI. The HOME was administered to parents to explore the characteristics of the home environment. Children’s knowledge of language, quantitative reasoning and memory functioning was assessed with selected items from the Binet Form IV version for pre-school children. Three scores were obtained from each child and two inventory-based scores were obtained from parents. Interviews were conducted on 20 parents to validate the appropriateness of the items on the inventories. The independent variables in the study were centre, sex and age. The dependent variables included the eleven developmental and problem subscales of the MPI and the eight HOME subscales, and the three cognitive tests were analyzed for means, standard deviations and tested for statistical significance. Graphic presentation was employed for MPI results to provide visual contrast of children’s developmental characteristics. Results from the MPI supported by parent interviews indicated that the five and six year old children were developmentally normal and functioning efficiently in the family. Results from the interviews revealed that parents understood their children’s developmental abilities and could detect developmental and behaviour problems. The family environment provided children with variety of stimulation, but some constraints limited various aspects of environmental stimulation thus affecting children’s acquisition of some skills adversely. The results further indicated that most items on the MPI and a few items on the HOME were ecologically appropriate, however they required insight into cultural interpretations of developmental characteristics and behaviour. It was suggested that further research with the inventories is required before ecological and construct validity could be established.
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    Student participation in Tanzania secondary school classrooms
    (University of Dar es Salaam, 1976) Mbise, Akundaeli Safari
    Classroom interaction in Tanzania lacks a well developed literature which can enable the teachers, and to some extent other educators to understand the processes of teaching and learning. Even though learning is greatly a consequence of the interaction between teachers and students, the different roles played by the teachers and the students in the classroom have not yet been systematically studied. Knowledge of these roles is vital if innovation is to be introduced in the classroom, especially as called for in the Education for Self Reliance (1967) paper. The Problem for investigation in this study was thus to find out systematically, through observation, the different roles the teacher and the students play in the teaching and learning processes in live classrooms in Tanzania with emphasis on student participation. The method of inquiry was through direct recording and observation of the classroom in action. Four Form Three classes and four teachers, two teachers in Political Education and the other two in History, were observed over a period of two months. Twenty lessons equally divided for political Education and History were taped, transcribed and analysed to give tabular results. The Bellack’s Classroom Language Analysis model was used for classifying and analysing the data. The observations showed that despite the 1967 call for more student centred teaching where student participation would be maximized, teaching was still teacher centred and that student participation needed motivation. The predominant teaching method was the lecture teacher talk student listen. In average teachers made 67 per cent of all the pedagogical moves and students in the classroom shard the remaining 33 per cent. Similarly, teachers communicated 59.0 per cent of the pedagogical meanings while students shared the 41.0 per cent. The meanings dominated by the teachers were the substantive logical and the instructional logical type. Thus, teachers dealt with the explanatory and interpretational aspects of the lessons. Classroom management was done by the teachers. They also assigned and evaluated student activities without students taking part. The amount of control exerted by the students on instruction and classroom management was very limited. Therefore to achieve greater student participation, one of the ideals in democratizing instruction, activities which stimulate student discussion need to be sought so that students are not merely answering the teachers’ questions. The medium of instruction too needs to be clearly mastered by the learners. The evidence from the research indicated that students were uncertain of whether Kiswahili or English should be the medium of instruction. The ambivalence suggested that both languages could still be used interchangeably in the classroom and yet the ambivalence is difficult to be accounted for.