Research

Roots and Shoots Wave 2 Report (with Cally Ardington)

The South African government passed a law in 2023 that made Grade R (kindergarten) compulsory. It is hoped that this will improve learner preparedness for Grade 1. But there are major concerns about the quality of Grade R programmes and whether attendance will actually improve school readiness. In this report, we investigate how learning outcomes changed over the course of the Grade R year for 440 learners attending schools with varying levels of quality. Learners were assessed in emergent literacy and mathematics at the beginning of Grade R and again at the beginning of Grade 1. Encouragingly, we find that learners with the biggest developmental lags at the start of Grade R saw the largest learning gains. But there are clear differences in the quality of Grade R instruction: Learners attending schools charging the highest fees learned more than their counterparts in low-fee and no-fee schools. We conclude that making Grade R compulsory will have no effect on decreasing inequalities in school readiness if significant efforts are not devoted improving the quality of Grade R instruction.

You can find the report here.

The early roots of reading failure: ELOM in the Western Cape

Chapter 4 in Early Grade Reading in South Africa (edited by Nic Spaull and Elizabeth Pretorius (2022), Oxford University Press)

Learning starts long before children enter school. To date, we have no local evidence of the role of SES differences in school readiness in explaining SES differences in educational outcomes. This chapter presents the results from a study that examines the performance of children as they enter school (Term 1 Grade R) in a sample of 75 primary schools in the Western Cape. The early learning skills of children were assessed using the ELOM 4&5, a locally developed and validated instrument that assesses children in 5 key developmental domains. While the results point to clear SES differences in early learning scores, there is also much variation in scores within socio-economic groups. Making use of a unique opportunity to compare Grade R results with cross-sectional data of learner performance in Grade 1, 4 and 7, we show that Grade R achievement explains about 40% of performance in later grades. This points to the joint importance of both school readiness and school quality in determining learning outcomes.

Book downloadable here.

Why do girls do better? Unpacking South Africa’s gender gap in PIRLS and TIMSS.

International Journal of Educational Development, 2022, 84, 102648

South Africa exhibits one of the largest pro-girl gaps in education, yet the reasons behind this gap are poorly understood. This paper analyses South Africa’s pro-girl gap in Grade 4 reading and Grade 5 mathematics achievement. I make use of Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition analysis to decompose the observed gender gaps into their explained and unexplained components, separately by school socio-economic quintile. This approach allows me to present new evidence that part of the country’s pro-girl gaps in reading and mathematics are due to girls progressing through the early grades faster than boys. I also find that South African girls score higher on the constructs aimed at tapping student attitudes toward reading (reading self-efficacy and enjoyment, and engagement in reading lessons), and that these differences contribute significantly to the pro-girl gap in PIRLS reading achievement. Interestingly, despite outperforming boys in the TIMSS mathematics assessment, South African girls do not display more positive attitudes toward mathematics. The results suggest much more needs to be done to understand the reasons behind boys’ disadvantage in the early grades, since much of the pro-girl achievement gap in Grade 4 reading and Grade 5 mathematics can be attributed the pro-girl advantage in grade completion in earlier grades.

Illuminating shadow education in South Africa: Mapping participation and demand for extra lessons (with Joy Olivier)

TIMSS South Africa Working Papers, 2022

This paper investigates the prevalence of after school programmes in South Africa, focusing on extra maths lessons not provided by the school. Since 1995, the TIMSS results have consistently revealed that the majority of the country’s learners participate in extra lessons not provided by schools. However, there is very little research on the drivers of participation rates in this type of education in South Africa. This study analyses 2019 TIMSS data from Grade 9 learner surveys, primarily focusing on participation in extra mathematics lessons. It seeks to determine demand-side factors driving shadow education in South Africa using descriptive statistics and regression analysis. We find that participation in extra mathematics lessons offered by schools is high in South Africa, and greater among learners from lower socio-economic backgrounds and school quintiles. The paper concludes with a call for further research and highlights the need for a national audit of after-school programmes.

Paper available here.

Perseverance, passion and poverty: Examining the association between grit and reading achievement in high-poverty schools in South Africa

International Journal of Educational Development, 2021, 83, 102376

Grit is highly predictive of academic achievement in high-income countries. But does this association hold in contexts of poor school quality? This paper examines whether school characteristics moderate the association between grit and reading achievement in a sample of Grade 6 learners in high-poverty contexts. The analysis makes use of data from 2,383 learners distributed across 60 township and rural schools in three provinces of South Africa. Indicators of school functionality are used to split the sample of schools into three groups (low, medium, and high functionality) and separate models of reading achievement are estimated for each group. The econometric analysis points to evidence of variation in the association between grit and reading achievement by school functionality, with a stronger association estimated for learners in more functional schools. The major contributions of this paper areas follows: Firstly, this paper is one of only a handful of studies that estimate the relationship between grit and academic achievement in a middle-income country, and the first to estimate this relationship among primary school students in an African context. Second, the results provide empirical evidence that where you go to school influences the strength of this relationship.

Academic resilience in challenging contexts: Evidence from township and rural primary schools in South Africa (with Gabrielle Wills)

International Journal of Educational Research, 2019, 98: 192-205

Poverty is considered a risk factor that jeopardizes children’s academic performance. However, even in high-poverty contexts there are students who manage to achieve consistently good academic results. This paper uses a resilience framework to identify and describe the characteristics of students from South African rural and township primary schools who perform above socio-economic expectations in literacy. After accounting for differences in socio-economic status, we find that resilient students differ significantly from their lower-achieving peers along

various dimensions, especially socio-emotional skills. This is a promising finding in light of a growing body of research on skill formation, which suggests that these skills can be fostered through targeted interventions.