Evaluation of Back to Basics mathematics workbooks: a randomised control trial of the Primary Mathematics Research Project

Your Phone Has Internet - Why Are You at a Library PC? Re-imagining Public Access in the Mobile Internet Era

“…Unequal access to good teaching and facilities testify to contemporary class inequalities and to racial discrimination in past provisioned under apartheid [30]. Since 2002/3, public schools in the Western Cape Province, where Cape Town is located, have benefited from a rollout of computer labs and at around the same time, the SmartCape project began providing internet access to libraries in disadvantaged areas of Cape Town.…”

Interventions to improve learner achievement in South Africa: A systematic meta-analysis

“…A vivid illustration of the main story emerging out of the South African metaanalysis is the case of the evaluation of the Back to the Basics (B2) workbooks, where the methodological approach undertaken by two different evaluators (Fleisch et al, 2011;Schollar, 2015) led to diametrically opposite results, though they both implemented rigorous RCTs of the same intervention on the same grade level of learners in different provinces of South Africa. Both experiments, though well implemented, had methodological problems and limitations.…”

“…In the past decade, there has been a rise in the use of experimental approaches for the evaluation of education interventions in developing countries (Duflo, Glennerster & Kremer, 2008;McEwan, 2014) and also in South Africa (i.e. Fleisch et al, 2011;Louw, Muller & Tredoux, 2008;Schollar, 2015;Taylor & Watson, 2013). However, randomised control trials (RCTs) often face ethical, political and practical constraints, as they need to be built in at the design stage in the beginning of an intervention.…”

Pre-University education curriculum reform and the generic learning skills of medical school entrants: Lessons learned from South Africa

“…[16] While the relationship between learner performance and the quality of education that learners receive is complex, factors negatively influencing learners' performance include rapid expansion of the education system producing large numbers of poor quality institutions, [17] limited teachers' subject knowledge despite training, [18,19] inefficient use of classroom teaching time, [20] ineffective school management practices, [21] and poor access to basic resources such as textbooks. [22] All these challenges are mainly encountered in primary and secondary schools located in low socioeconomic areas. [20] In the face of such educational inequality, it is possible that implementation of a new primary and secondary school curriculum may have exacerbated the potential disparity in the generic learning skill profiles of school-leavers entering university in South Africa.…”