A Comparative Trend Analysis of Changes in Teacher Rate of Absenteeism in South Africa

Abstract

The aim of this research was to analyze the changes in the rate of teacher absenteeism among South African provinces as a major in-class factor contributing to student performance and effective learning. Time series analysis of exponential smoothing, moving average, and seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average model (SARIMA) were applied to model and assess the designed hypothesis as a major factor for educational advancement using different provincial data input from the Department of Basic Education in South Africa. The performances of all the models were analyzed using statistical indexes: Mean Square Error (MSE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). The overall performance showed that the absence rate increased statistically significantly from 2011 to 2017. Thus, this opinion was held by more than half of the general populace depending on the province type. The findings of this research could assist the management of the basic education department in general, and in schools in particular, to understand the problem of absenteeism and thereby enabling the implementation of effective strategies that can be used to curb the practice.

Prevalence and Economic Costs of Absenteeism in an Aging Population—A Quasi-Stochastic Projection for Germany

“…Sixth, we combined our population forecast obtained from (11) with an updated stochastic forecast of LFPRs suggested by Fuchs et al [3], which includes trends in age-, gender-and nationality-specific labor market participation. For instance, the LFPR of individuals of age a and gender g in year y l y,a,g represents the share of individuals in the said stratum available to the labor market, relative to the population of the same age and gender.…”

“…While this perspective is rather cross-sectional, we are specifically interested in longitudinal trends in absenteeism in forecasting, which may serve as valuable information for political and economic planning [10]. For instance, effective monitoring of teaching to ensure the learning process among students could include investigations of long-term trends in teachers' absenteeism [11]. Another example is the scheduling of hospital staff on duty to ensure proper care for the patients [12].…”

“…Furthermore, these approaches require microlevel data, which often are not available to forecasters. Msosa [11] suggested classical time series approaches, especially the Holt-Winters model, for forecasting regional absenteeism rates among teachers in South Africa, yet presented neither a real forecast nor included demographic, economic, or epidemiological trends in the model. Markham and Markham [21] presented a prediction model of absenteeism based on environmental variables, which could potentially cover weather conditions in forecasting absenteeism.…”

Applying Deep Learning in the Training of Communication Design Talents Under University-Industrial Research Collaboration

“…In the teaching stage, universities can use other environments such as social enterprises as the basis of the teaching environment and transform knowledge dissemination into a more direct teaching method, which greatly improves society-required skills and abilities. In this process, it is necessary to find an algorithm model that can analyze talent ability and provide a theoretical basis for this concept ( Msosa, 2020 ).…”

Do Motivated Teachers Enhance Students’ Learning?

“…In developing countries, where the problem is more prevalent, some 25 percent of the education budget allocated to primary education is lost to teacher absenteeism (Lee et al, 2015;Msosa, 2020;Transparency International, 2013). This situation has led some countries to implementing pecuniary incentives to recruit and retain high-quality classroom teachers, and to motivate them to improve students' learning (Duflo et al, 2012;Muralidharan, 2012;UNESCO-IICBA, 2017).…”