In Zambia, curriculum development for primary and secondary schools is done centrally. The Curriculum Development Centre (CDC), the institution placed with the responsibility of facilitating curriculum development, claims that the Zambian school curriculum is developed through a consultative and participatory approach through course and subject panels where teachers and other stakeholders are represented. However, there has been no empirical evidence to suggest the roles that teachers, who are the major implementers of the same curricular, are required to play in the development process. This study therefore, sought to establish perceptions of secondary school teachers on their role in the curriculum development process in Zambia. The concurrent embedded design of the mixed methods approach was employed with the qualitative approach dominating the study while the quantitative was used to add detail. Data from secondary school teachers was collected using questionnaires while interview guides were used for Head teachers. Raw data collected from interviews and questionnaires was analyzed using themes and descriptive statistics and then arranged into significant patterns so as to easily interpret and understand the essence of the data. The findings of the study clearly suggested that the majority of secondary school teachers in Lusaka were willing to participate in the curriculum development process, especially in situational analysis, in the formulation of educational objectives, in setting up the curriculum project, and in the writing of curriculum materials such as textbooks. From the study it was concluded that teachers were aware of some of the roles that they could play in the curriculum development but were not adequately involved in the development process.

This paper discusses a sweetgum leaf-spot image segmentation method based on an improved DeeplabV3+ network to address the low accuracy in plant leaf spot segmentation, problems with the recognition model, insufficient datasets, and slow training speeds. We replaced the backbone feature extraction network of the model's encoder with the MobileNetV2 network, which greatly reduced the amount of calculation being performed in the model and improved its calculation speed. Then, the attention mechanism module was introduced into the backbone feature extraction network and the decoder, which further optimized the model’s edge recognition effect and improved the model's segmentation accuracy. Given the category imbalance in the sweetgum leaf spot dataset (SLSD), a weighted loss function was introduced and assigned to two different types of weights, for spots and the background, respectively, to improve the segmentation of disease spot regions in the model. Finally, we graded the degree of the lesions. The experimental results show that the PA, mRecall, and mIou algorithms of the improved model were 94.5%, 85.4%, and 81.3%, respectively, which are superior to the traditional DeeplabV3+, Unet, Segnet models and other commonly used plant disease semantic segmentation methods. The model shows excellent performance for different degrees of speckle segmentation, demonstrating that this method can effectively improve the model’s segmentation performance for sweetgum leaf spots.

<p>In this study, researchers investigated the implementation of Free Primary Education Policy in selected primary schools of Kafue district of Zambia. The study’s objective was to determine the possible conflicts that had arose between learners’ access to education and supply of quality education. As a descriptive survey, the study population consisted of one hundred and twenty (120) teachers, twenty-four (24) head teachers one (2) Ministry of General Education (MoGE) officials. The teachers responded to a questionnaire while the head teachers and MoGE officials were interviewed using structured interview schedules. An observation checklist was used to record the schools’ enrolments, equipment and facilities that were available. Data was analyzed thematically as themes and sub themes emerged from the data. Finding showed that there were high enrolments in Kafue primary schools, an indication that many learners had free access to education but this led to a number of challenges such as: inadequate educational supplies, low staffing levels, inadequate classrooms and desks. Teachers were being overworked and were unable to attend to individual needs of pupils. They also could not manage to give adequate homework and remedial work due to large classes. Consequently, the Zambian government seems to have failed to meet the needs of primary schools in Kafue due to the surge in enrolments. Scholars in this study recommended that the Ministry of General Education should evaluate the practicality and sustainably of the Free Primary Education in all primary schools in Kafue district. Furthermore, additional funds should be allocated for schools to enable them buy teaching and learning materials.</p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0696/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

The relevance of the school curriculum cannot be over emphasised in every form of education system. Of vital importance in the upholding of curriculum relevance in any society is the insurance that it is well contextualised or localised. When the curriculum is not contextualised and its implementation process not localised, the education system risk producing learners in a vacuum who may not eventually play a significant role in solving various societal glitches. If a country is to achieve rapid economic growth however, its education should be related to productivity (Bishop, 1985). Some of the solutions to problems currently encountered in African societies and communities Zambia inclusive, must proceed from understanding the dynamics with the local context. It is from this background that this study was undertaken to explore perspectives on practical measures and policies in enhancing the implementation of the localised curriculum in Mwansabombwe district of Zambia. The researchers used qualitative research approach specifically descriptive research design to collect, analyse and interpret data. Out of the study population of 30,000 residents of Mwansabombwe district, 50 respondents were purposively sampled whose break downs were as follows; 10 local community members, 10 learners, 20 teachers, 5 officers from Mwansabombwe District Education Board Secretary’s office (DEBS) and 5 Education Standards Officers. Both semi structured interview guide and focus group discussion guide were used to collect data and content analysis was used to analyse the collected data. Research findings revealed that there was no effective implementation of the localised curriculum in Mwansabombwe district. This was necessitated by lack of appropriate practical measures by the Ministry of Education (MoE) to address key issues such as those that had to do with; teaching and learning materials, lack of capacity building amongst the teaching staff, lack of motivation amongst the learners, teachers and community members as well as ignorance on pertinent issues surrounding the localisation of the curriculum amongst various stakeholders. Hence from the research findings, it was recommended that the MoE need to thoroughly conduct both needs assessment and situation analysis for the localisation of the curriculum to be effectively implemented in Zambian schools. Besides, the MoE needed to reinforce policy on localisation of the curriculum in schools if the country was to achieve the intended results about the localised curriculum.

Curriculum implementation is part and parcel of the curriculum development process. When curriculum developers intend to develop a curriculum, they are expected to put in place ways and means of having it implemented. Once this is ignored, all the good efforts and aspirations of curriculum developers as well as of the general public risk being wasted and misrepresented. Therefore, a very good curriculum is worthless if it cannot bring about the results of what it was intended for. Based on studies that have been done both locally and internationally, the authors of this paper attempted to give an analysis of barriers that may render a well-developed curriculum useless if appropriate remedies or simply best practices of bridging the gap between the intended and achieved curriculum are neglected in the education system of the country. Due to several impediments to the effective implementation of the school curriculum, it was recommended that the Zambian government needed to put in place best practices that would improve the quality of Zambian education by providing adequate funding to the education sector and this will in turn lead to the country's economic development. There was also a need for the Ministry of General Education to consider improving; the quality and quantity of the teaching staff, availability of school facilities and equipment as well as ensuring that time is appropriately managed for the good management of the curriculum.