A research report submitted to the Wits School of Education, University of Witwatersrand, in
partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Education
Submission 17 October 2016 / As access to formal schooling has expanded all over the world, there is acknowledgement that
the quality of learning in many schooling systems, including South Africa, is extremely weak.
Nationally representative samples of South African children participated in the PIRLS 2006 and
pre-PIRLS 2011 studies, along with 48 other countries as a benchmarking exercise to measure
the literacy levels of primary schools according to international standards. The PIRLS 2006 study
indicated that more than 80% of South African children had not yet learned to read with
meaning by grade 5. The pre-PIRLS results provided a new baseline of reading literacy levels for
Grade 4 learners in South Africa, 29% of Grade 4 learners that participated did not have the
rudimentary reading skills required at a Grade 2 level. Learners tested in African languages,
particularly Sepedi and Tshivenda, achieved the lowest performance overall and were
considered to be educationally at risk (University of Pretoria, 2012).
The context in which schooling takes place is key in understanding learner performance in
South Africa. After decades of differential provision of education on the basis of race, the
education system has been overhauled since the early 1990s. The South African government
has introduced several initiatives and policies to address these systemic imbalances. All things
considered, South Africa’s learner performance has remained poor, even relative to several
poorer countries in the region.
There is a wealth of research describing weaknesses in the education system. However, going a
step further and identifying resources and practices that actually improve learner performance
is central to improving education planning, policy and ultimately classroom practice. Rigorous
evidence on classroom-based practice and resources that will have a measurable effect on
learner performance in a developing country like South Africa is limited. The most significant
shortfall of non-experimental evaluation methods (including qualitative and many quantitative
approaches) is the absence of a valid estimate of the counterfactual – what outcomes would
have been obtained amongst programme beneficiaries had they not received the programme.
This often leads to the reporting of large positive effects of programmes being evaluated.
By using a lottery to allocate participants to an intervention and a control group, the
Randomised Control Trial (RCT) methodology constructs a credible ‘counterfactual’ scenario –
what might have happened to those who received an intervention had they not received it. This
study provides a systematic literature-based argument on why RCTs should be part of the
methodological options education researchers and policy makers consider in developing
countries such as South Africa. Both the strengths and limitations of RCTs are discussed in light
of the debate on RCTs and evaluation methods in education, as well as the technical critique of
the methodology. The main critique of external validity is also elaborated on with efforts that
may be taken to diminish the limitations discussed.
In addition, the study illustrates the value of RCTs using data from two South Africa RCTs on
early grade reading interventions through a secondary analysis of the RCT data. The first case
study in Chapter 4, is the Reading Catch-Up Programme (RCUP) conducted in Pinetown,
KwaZulu-Natal. The main findings of the RCUP evaluation were that although learners in
intervention schools improved their test scores between the baseline and the endline
assessment, the learners in comparison schools improved by a similar margin. The results
should contribute to a sobering realisation that the effects of the various interventions
introduced by education stakeholders including NGOs and government are not obviously
positive or more importantly, different from normal schooling. This points to the need to
evaluate programmes before they are rolled out provincially or nationally, using RCTs and other
rigorous methods.
The new analysis of data in this study explores the so-called “Matthew Effect” - the notion that
initially better-performing children typically gain more from additional interventions and from
schooling itself. The data from the RCUP RCT indicates that children with higher baseline test
scores benefited from the intervention, whereas children with very low English proficiency at
the outset did not benefit from the programme. Although females significantly outperform
males in the reading tests used, there was no clear evidence of a differential effect of the
intervention by gender. The Matthew Effect therefore seems to be driven by prior knowledge
and not gender or any other characteristic that was measured in the data.
The second case study in Chapter 5, is the Early Grade Reading Study (EGRS) conducted in the
North West province. The EGRS may be seen as a more extensive follow-up to the RCUP to
answer some of the unanswered questions. For example, will an early grade reading
intervention that is implemented over a longer duration (two years) have an impact? Can
intervening right at the start of school be a strategic point to intervene? Can a Home Language
literacy intervention have lasting educational benefits?
In conclusion, although the policy formulation and evaluation process should draw on research
using a variety of methods, the policy process will certainly be impoverished if there is a lack of
research meeting two core criteria: interventions and findings that are relevant to the larger
schooling population; and the precise measurement of the causal impact of interventions
and/or policies. This study makes a clear literature-based argument on the contribution of
internally valid methods, specifically RCTs in fulfilling these criteria and illustrates this with two
case studies of RCTS. The study also provides a demonstration of the insights that are possible
through secondary analysis founded on the richness of RCT data. / MT2017
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/22682 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Creators | Mohohlwane, Nompumelelo Lungile |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | Online resource (132 leaves + appendices), application/pdf, application/pdf |
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