Papua New Guinea Sample Mathematics Test Report : Analysis of Grade 6, 7 & 8, and Teachers College students' performance on a sample Mathematics Test for Papua New Guinea (PNG)

Many Papua New Guineans students at all level of the national education system comment that they always found mathematics a difficult subject to understand. The learning difficulties are experienced by many school students under the current mathematics curriculum. This report is based on a sample mathematics test conducted with a sample population from grade 6, 7 and 8 and teacher training college students. The items were taken from grade four according to PNG mathematics curriculum. Most of the results obtained were surprisingly unsatisfactory from both the sample primary participating students and the Teacher training college students. The findings indicated common areas of misconception in addition and subtraction of fraction, comparing decimals numbers, addition & subtraction of 2-digit from 3-digit numbers and knowledge geometry questions by school, gender and across different grade level. The similar type of misconception were also noticed from the teacher training college students. The significant of this report is to inform educators, curriculum planners, teachers and universities the general misconception of teaching and learning in Primary Education in PNG so that focus and framework of the teaching and learning in mathematics in primary education could be restructured regarding students learning difficulties which are revealed in this report.