The Newman Procedure for Analyzing Primary Four Pupils Errors on Written Mathematical Tasks: A Malaysian Perspective

The change in PPSMI's language of learning and teaching of Mathematics to English had been opined to have prejudiced learners’ achievements due to their weakness in the subject matter as well as in English. This study was conducted to ascertain the validity of such claims and it sought to determine the composition of error types committed by 22, purposively sampled, Primary Four pupils in Mathematics tasks presented in English. Semi-structured interviews were conducted using the Newman's Error Analysis protocol with these pupils who answered inaccurately in several of the test's items. It was found that, collectively (both urban and rural), the Primary 4 pupils’ errors were language related and the rest 68% were content-knowledge related. This study concluded that the pupils faced more problem in content-knowledge compared to language difficulties when tackling mathematical tasks in English.