Starting Behind and Staying Behind in South Africa: The case of insurmountable learning deficits in mathematics

Nicholas Spaull () and Janeli Kotze ()
Additional contact information
Janeli Kotze: Department of Economics, University of Stellenbosch

No 27/2014, Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This study quantifies a year’s worth of mathematics learning in South Africa (0.3 standard deviations) and uses this measure to develop empirically-calibrated learning trajectories. Two main findings are, (1) only the top 16% of South African Grade 3 children are performing at an appropriate Grade 3 level. (2) The learning gap between the poorest 60% of students and the wealthiest 20% of students is approximately three Grade-levels in Grade 3, growing to four Grade-levels by Grade 9. The paper concludes by arguing that the later in life we attempt to repair early learning deficits in mathematics, the costlier the remediation becomes.

Keywords: Mathematics; Learning Trajectories; South Africa; Hierarchical Learning; SACMEQ; TIMSS (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ekon.sun.ac.za/wpapers/2014/wp272014/wp-27-2014.pdf First version, 2014 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sza:wpaper:wpapers232

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Melt van Schoor ().