LEARNER ASSESSMENTS
LEARNER ASSESSMENTS
The Department will be actively involved in a number of activities aimed at making a critical impact on the number of passes in the 2010 national Grade 12 examinations. The message sent to schools in 2010 and beyond will not only be to increase the pass rate, which may result in undesirable holding back of learners in Grade 11, but rather to increase the number of learners passing the examinations.
The activities of the Department will include media campaigns, linked to the Quality Learn- ing and Teaching Campaign (QLTC), the distribution of studyguides, assessment tasks and examination exemplars to learners. The Department will make use of the Thutong web portal, and collaborate with provinces to ensure that there are no Grade 12 learn- ers who are without all the textbooks they need for this critical year in their lives. Special attention will go towards strengthening the teaching and learning of mathematics and physical sciences in schools.
The Dinaledi programme, which focuses on these subjects, will from 2011/12 be funded through a conditional grant. This will provide the Department with new opportunities to ensure that this programme impacts on the participating schools and also that it comes up with best practices that can be applied across the system. In recent years, South Africa has embarked on the ambitious task of running regular standardised tests across schools in all nine provinces in the interests of improving educational quality. This shift towards system-wide standardised tests is in line with best practices in other countries where public concern over quality is high.
The research demonstrates that com- prehensive and contextually relevant ac- countability systems are one of the most effective ways to turn around a schooling system. Though the basic building blocks for system-wide assessments in South Af- rican schools, in particular the Systemic Evaluation, Foundations for Learning and
Annual National Assessments, are in place, there is room for much fine-tuning, and for more creative ways of using assessment data to hold schools accountable, and iden- tify problem hotspots in the system.
The aim is that all learners in Grades R to 9 should write nationally standardised tests, with some external controls over the marking process, and that for a sample of approximately 200 schools per province, the testing and marking process should be externally controlled so that the reliability of the testing process as a whole can be assessed. A key milestone will also be an external evaluation of the Foundations for Learning and Annual National Assessments programmes, to be completed by 2012.
Work will commence on the development of an integrated strategy that will guide matters such as the generation of tests, the promotion of standardised marking of these, the selection and testing proce- dures for the sample, and, very importantly, how the use of the information by districts, school principals, teachers and parents will improve quality. Experiences in other countries suggest there are critical choices that must be made, and that it is important to seek advice from both local and foreign experts in order to arrive at a strategy that is credible, workable and that can make a difference to learning. At the same time, the international practice suggests that the involvement of teacher organisations in the design of the strategy is vital.
KEY STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE 2: NEW INTEGRATED STRATEGY ON THE ASSESSMENT OF LEARNERS
Participation in international testing pro- grammes will continue, partly so that the country’s educational performance can be compared to that in other countries, and partly to improve capacity within the coun- try in the application of the latest assess- ment methods. Preparation within the De- partment for South Africa’s participation in the 2012 wave of SACMEQ, which focuses on Grade 6, has already begun.
Moreover, the Department is actively in- volved in the preparations for South Africa’s participation in 2011 in PIRLS, focussing on reading, and TIMSS, focussing on math- ematics. The Quality Learning and Teaching Campaign (QLTC), launched in 2008 and involving a social compact between teach- ers, learners, parents and departments, in- troduced an important framework in which teacher professionalism would be respected and teacher accountability enhanced. The QLTC is a vital campaign that has already brought about greater levels of trust and respect between teachers and their organ- isations, on the one hand, and departments, on the other. Trust and mutual respect are clearly prerequisites for the development of the right teacher policies, and effective implementation of these policies.
The Department will remain actively in- volved in the QLTC in the coming years, and will continue to provide secretarial and administrative services to the campaign. A critical responsibility of the Department is the maintenance of a credible and logical set of conditions of service for teachers through ongoing work with teacher unions in the Education Labour Relations Council (ELRC). Both the employer and employee organisa- tions agree that the structure of the salary system is not ideal. In the coming years, considerable effort will go into revisiting the effectiveness of the Integrated Quality Man- agement System (IQMS). Teachers need to feel that the IQMS treats teachers fairly and the programme must lead to measurable improvements in educational quality.
KEY STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE 3: NEW INTEGRATED PLAN FOR TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
There is wide agreement amongst educa- tion stakeholders that subject knowledge amongst teachers is often well below what it should be. In order to monitor progress in this area, and to clarify precisely what subject content areas need to be ad- dressed, the Department will develop a new approach to assessing teacher com-
petencies which will support the national development plan for training.
Recent research on teacher supply, demand and utilisation has confirmed the need for better planning in this area, and the need for better data. The finalisation of the first operational version of the Education Hu- man Resources Management Information System (EHRMIS) in 2011 is expected to facilitate planning through the provision of data, such as data on teacher specialisa- tions, which are currently difficult to obtain.
The Department will work closely with the Department of Higher Education and Training to ensure that the Funza Lushaka bursary programme for prospective teach- ers is strengthened in the interests of an adequate supply of young teachers for pub- lic schools in the coming years.
TEXTBOOKS AND WORKBOOKS
KEY STRATEGIC OBJECTIVE 4: WORKBOOKS FOR GRADES R TO 9 LEARNERS
To distribute workbooks to all Grades R to 9 learners in all public schools in order to facilitate the implementation of the curricu- lum among the poorest schools.
With respect to textbooks, the Depart- ment has established a Ministerial Com- mittee to investigate pricing and procure- ment of textbooks, as well as the ongoing maintenance of a national catalogue. The Department will continue to maintain text- book catalogues to guide provinces and schools in the selection of appropriate textbooks for Grades 10 to 12. In addition, however, the Department will commission research that will examine more closely how textbooks are used in schools, and whether certain textbooks are associated with better learning results than others.
18 CHAPTER 1 | INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW
www.ed.org.za
www.ed.org.za
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