Exploring Valuing Pedagogies Across Grade Levels: Insights From Ghana’s Standards-Based Mathematics Curricula

Mathematics education around the world has increasingly come under scrutiny for how well it supports not only academic achievement but also students’ holistic development, including their values. As national curriculum reforms continue to prioritise valuing in teaching and learning, understanding how valuing pedagogies are integrated becomes crucial. This study sought to contribute to the ongoing discourse on mathematics education in Ghana, highlighting the importance of aligning curricular goals with pedagogical practices that support students’ values development. It reports on the differences and similarities in valuing pedagogies across grade levels of the Ghanaian mathematics curricula. Content analysis was performed on three purposively sampled mathematics curricula—lower primary, upper primary, and junior high school mathematics curricula. The references to valuing pedagogies were counted and further analysed using percentages and chi-square tests of independence, supported with excerpts from the curricula. The results revealed that all three curricula emphasise affective and cognitive valuing pedagogies over social valuing pedagogies. In addition, the espousal of social valuing pedagogies decreases from lower primary to junior high school, whereas cognitive and affective valuing pedagogies increase. Across lower primary, upper primary, and junior high school curricula, serious learning, domain learning, achievement, and realising learning consistently outrank their complements: playful learning, life learning, EDI, and saving face. The chi-square test (χ 2 > 5.991) further revealed significant differences in the representation of valuing pedagogy pairs across grade levels, except for domain and life learning. The implications of the results and recommendations for further studies are discussed accordingly.