Nic Spaull
Research Fellow
Email: nicspaull@gmail.com
Research Fellow
Nic Spaull is currently a Research Fellow at the Research on Socioeconomic Policy (RESEP) group. He has recently returned from Paris where he was a Thomas J Alexander Fellow at the OECD, and before that a Visiting Scholar in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University in the United States. Nic has a PhD in economics and has published numerous journal articles on education, focusing on assessment, accountability, literacy and education policy in South Africa. He is also a Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg and sits on the Joint Advisory Committee of the South African Human Rights Commission. His current research focuses on exceptional township and rural schools in South Africa as part of an ESRC/DFID grant for 2016/17/18. Nic has been involved in a number of research projects for local and international organisations, including the South African Presidency, the Department of Basic Education, UNICEF, the EU, UNESCO and SACMEQ. The most recent of which was the “Binding Constraints in Education” project for the South African Presidency and the EU. He advises numerous NGOs, policy-makers and grant-making bodies, and also regularly updates his website (nicspaull.com) with new research and articles he finds interesting.
Articles
- Creating reading fluency benchmarks in African languages
- The ‘Martha Effect’: The compounding female advantage in South African higher education
- Disentangling the language effect in South African schools: Measuring the impact of ‘language of assessment’ in grade 3 literacy and numeracy
- Funda Wande: Teaching Reading for Meaning
- Who makes it into PISA? Understanding the impact of PISA sample eligibility using Turkey as a case study (PISA 2003 – PISA 2012)
- The impact of language on learning in primary schools: some preliminary results
- Quantifying educational inequality: an application of Finite Mixture Modeling using TIMSS 2011 / Janet Graaff: Governance of South African No-Fee Schools: preliminary insights to be gained from qualitative and quantitative analysis
- HIV-related discrimination among Grade Six pupils in nine Southern African countries
- Identifying Binding Constraints in Education
- Equity & efficiency in South African primary schools: A preliminary analysis of SACMEQ III South Africa
- A Preliminary Analysis of SACMEQ III South Africa
- Education Quality in South Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa: An Economic Approach
- Poverty & Privilege: Primary School Inequality in South Africa
- “Effective enrolment” – Creating a composite measure of educational access and educational quality to accurately describe education system performance in sub-Saharan Africa.
- The effects of rapidly expanding primary school access on effective learning: The case of Southern and Eastern Africa since 2000
- What do we know about primary teachers’ mathematical content knowledge in South Africa? An analysis of SACMEQ 2007
- Examining oral reading fluency among grade 5 rural English Second Language (ESL) learners in South Africa: An analysis of NEEDU 2013
- Learning to read and reading to learn
- Excessive class sizes in the Foundation Phase
- SA learners perform poorly relative to local and regional standards
- Identifying policy priorities to improve outcomes for poor primary school learners