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Education – Publications

The role of assessment in Foundation Phase improvement: The Annual National Assessments and beyond

Measuring learning outcomes (what learners know and can do) has been a contested terrain for many education systems and researchers, despite universal acknowledgement that assessment plays an important role in curriculum implementation (UNESCO 2013; Darling-Hammond & Wentworth 2010; Department of Education [DoE] 1995). Venkat and Sapire (this volume) refer to the ‘essential circuits’ of education and the
link between the curriculum, teaching practice, and assessment. Our focus is strictly on the Foundation Phase (FP), and where we refer to a specific subject, mathematics is our first concern. This chapter, therefore, only makes passing reference to the major external assessment, the National Senior Certificate (NSC) or matric examination.

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July 11, 2023 By: Carol Nuga Deliwe and Servaas van der Berg PDF

COVID-19 learning losses: Early grade reading in South Africa

Using three different studies on early grade reading from no-fee schools across in South Africa, this paper establishes short-term learning losses in reading for grade 2 and 4 students from under-resourced school contexts. We find that in 2020 grade 2 students lost between 57 % and 70 % of a year of learning relative to their pre-pandemic peers.

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October 18, 2021 By: Cally Ardington, Gabrielle Wills, and Janeli Kotze PDF

Benchmarking oral reading fluency in the early grades in Nguni languages

To prevent children from falling behind in the developmental sequence of reading, a shared vision of what reading success looks like is required. This paper provides the first benchmarks for early grade oral reading fluency that are necessary (albeit not sufficient) to read for meaning in three Nguni languages – isiZulu, isiXhosa and Siswati – belonging to the Southern Bantu family of African languages.

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July 18, 2021 By: Cally Ardington, Gabrielle Wills, Elizabeth Pretorius, Nompumelelo Mohohlwane, and Alicia Menendeze PDF