Skip to main content

Education

RESEP education research has a strong emphasis on empirical research in a broad range of policy-related issues including teacher knowledge and training, early-childhood outcomes, accountability, socioeconomic status, and school effectiveness. Policy application is one of the central aims of the research.

Publications: Education

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.

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.

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

Equity: A Price Too High to Pay?

Spaull, N. (2019). Equity: A Price Too High to Pay? In Spaull, N., & Jansen, J. (Eds), South African Schooling: The Enigma of Inequality. Springer Nature. Cham, Switzerland.

November 11, 2019 By: Nic Spaull PDF