The World Economic Forum (WEF) has released its Global Information Technology Report 2015, which ranked South Africa last in the quality of mathematics and science education.
South Africa also finished close to last – 139 out of 143 countries – when looking at the overall quality of its education system.
The WEF’s Global Information Technology Report 2015 ranks SA’s mathematics and science education quality lower than Angola, the Dominican Republic, and Mozambique.
It should be noted that these rankings are based on the perceptions of business leaders, and make use of the WEF’s annual “Executive Opinion Survey” to establish how well a country’s education system is performing.
In this survey the opinions of business leaders are gathered on a variety of topics.
The WEF’s education quality rankings are an assessment of the quality of mathematics and science graduates.
Matriculants who wrote maths, maths literacy and physical science did much worse than their peers in 2013, said monitoring body Umalusi on Wednesday.
Speaking from Pretoria today, Umalusi council chairperson John Volmink said the drop in mathematics results was due to major changes in the content of the subject. This year, pupils had to study Euclidean geometry and probability.
“This was shown in the learner performance in that there is a significant increase in the failure rate compared with 2013,” he told reporters. “However learners at the top experienced the mathematics examinations much easier.”
He said there were more failures than distinctions in maths, but he believes this was due to how the pupils were being taught. He said there had been no real improvement in marks over the past five years.
“To be quite frank, we thought the results would be much worse because large sections of the mathematics curriculum was not there last year,” he added.
Volmink said maths literacy marks were adjusted upwards at all levels as pupils did “significantly worse” this year than in any previous year.
In physical science, learners’ marks were also adjusted upwards at all levels.
The results of all but 58 examination centres implicated in cheating will be released next week.
Ten percent. This is the average mark that Grade 9 pupils scored for maths in this year’s Annual National Assessment.
When making the announcement in Diepsloot on Thursday morning, a disappointed Angie Motshekga, Minister of Basic Education, said unlike the foundation phase, the senior phase was not responding to the department’s interventions.
The test, now in its third year, was written in September by over 7 million pupils from grades 1 to 9, with grades 7 and 8 taking part for the first time. The assessments aren’t used to grade pupils but are a diagnostic tool to test maths, language and literacy skills and to determine whether they know what they were supposed to have learnt in previous grades.
Last year, Grade 9 scored a 14 percent average and in 2012, the maths average was 12 percent.
“The Grade 9 results show our interventions are not working. Something has to give, the system is not responding at this point,” Motshekga said.
She said the department would do another in-depth investigation to assess where the problems in Grade 9 were, but admitted that she was disappointed as she thought that the department was on track with the interventions.
She said this was reflective of a deficit in the system, which peaks when pupils reach the senior phase.
The government’s biggest challenge is to make maths and science exciting and popular for school pupils, President Jacob Zuma said on Friday.
“Science offers students the ability to access a wealth of knowledge and information, which will contribute to an overall understanding of how and why things work the way they do,” he said in a speech prepared for delivery.
“Through science, you will be able to explain the mechanics and reasons behind the daily functioning of complex systems, which range from the human body to sophisticated modern methods of transport up to the workings of the Square Kilometre Array telescope that our country won the bid to construct.”
Zuma was speaking to finalists of the Eskom Expo for Young Scientists. He was hosting them as part of National Children’s Day at the Sefako Makgatho Presidential Guest House, IN Pretoria.
Zuma said that by producing more science and technology graduates, the country was assured of a bright future economically.
“It means our economy will have all the scientists, technologists, engineers, artisans and other skills that we need for economic development.
“It also means we will have all the expertise we need to prevent and cure diseases or to fight poverty through better agricultural methods,” he said. – Sapa
Problems inherited from the apartheid era can be solved through research, Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe said – without irony – on Saturday, as South Africa struggles with ever worsening maths en science results since 1994.
South Africa has hit rock bottom in an international measure of the quality of maths and science education recently.
Concern is mounting whether the education system is producing a sufficient number of graduates in the hard sciences to support South Africa’s growth and development.
The World Economic Forum’s annual report on financial development, released in 2012, placed South Africa last in a ranking of 62 countries in the quality of maths and science education.
The 2011 census results, released on Tuesday, showed that a decade ago mostly white 2.7% of men and 2% of women who had tertiary qualifications in South Africa had qualifications in the fields of natural, physical and mathematical sciences. By 2011, this had declined to 2% of men and 1.8% of women, due to racial discrimination against whites.
“Inevitably, most if not all the historically inherited challenges constituting a dead weight on our development ambitions can only be addressed through the research agenda of our national research institutes,” Motlanthe told a summit on science and technology in Polokwane, Limpopo.
Motlanthe said national research institutes had the task to remain relevant to the developmental agenda through the use of science, technology and innovation.
“In other words harnessing the force of science and technology to meet our developmental needs is among the surest ways out of the current quagmire of under-development,” he said.
Motlanthe said through the National Development Plan, government laid out the parameters within which each social partner could make a contribution towards the achievement of the country’s shared vision.
“This shared vision entails the reduction of poverty, stimulating economic growth, effecting economic transformation and creating employment.” He said South Africa needed to do more in mobilising resources for the task of producing quality education for both teachers and learners alike.
“Only a sound and quality education system with strong emphasis on mathematics and science can serve as a reliable feeder for tertiary institutions…,” he said.
Motlanthe said research projects were carried out disparately without knowledge sharing and co-ordination to avoid duplication.
“Our national research efforts lack a central framework or institute to define and identify the most immediate projects, resulting in duplication, wastage and inefficient use of funding.” The lack of collaboration robbed the country of the benefits which would accrue from research.
Research institutes could commission a study of the systemic failure in the governance system and how best could government address its problems, he said.
Motlanthe said under-utilisation of existing research institutes by government often led to wasteful expenditure in that each government department commissioned research in common areas.
“I submit that the benefits of science, technology and innovation are not only potentially immense for us but also, and more crucially, constitute the pre-conditions for South Africa’s development.” – SAPA/praag
South Africa’s maths and science education has been ranked second last in the world, ahead of Yemen, according to a World Economic Forum report.
The quality of the country’s general education system ranked 140 out of 144 countries, while internet access in schools is ranked at 111 out of 143 countries, stated the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report 2013.
“Going up two positions, South Africa is in 70th place. Despite a sharp improvement in the development of its ICT infrastructure (59th) – notably in terms of international Internet bandwidth capacity (66th) – and a strong uptake by the business community (33rd), the ICT impacts (92nd), particularly the social ones (112th), remain limited.
“The perception of a lack of clear government vision (105th) to orchestrate and implement a holistic ICT strategy for the country, coupled with deficiencies in the educational system for some segments of the population (102nd), play negatively in this process and outweigh a rather positive political and regulatory framework for ICT development (21st) and pro-business environment (55th),” the report read.
It is the latest indictment on South Africa’s education system since the 2011 Progress in International Reading Literature Study (Pirls) which indicated that most South African grade five learners have not yet acquired basic literacy skills.
“Forty-three percent of South African grade five learners failed to reach the lowest international benchmark, in contrast to 5% of grade four learners internationally. This means that they have not yet mastered the basic reading skills required to access and retrieve information for reading comprehension purposes,” the Pirls report stated.
It further revealed that about 90% of the grade four learners tested attained the lowest international benchmark.
Learners tested in Sepedi and Tshivenda achieved the lowest results, according to the study. – M&G
The Florida State Board of Education passed a plan that sets goals for students in math and reading based upon their race.
On Tuesday, the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent. It also measures by other groupings, such as poverty and disabilities, reported the Palm Beach Post.
The plan has infuriated many community activists in Palm Beach County and across the state.
“To expect less from one demographic and more from another is just a little off-base,” Juan Lopez, magnet coordinator at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Riviera Beach, told the Palm Beach Post.
JFK Middle has a black student population of about 88 percent.
“Our kids, although they come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, they still have the ability to learn,” Lopez said. “To dumb down the expectations for one group, that seems a little unfair.”
Others in the community agreed with Lopez’s assessment. But the Florida Department of Education said the goals recognize that not every group is starting from the same point and are meant to be ambitious but realistic.
As an example, the percentage of white students scoring at or above grade level (as measured by whether they scored a 3 or higher on the reading FCAT) was 69 percent in 2011-2012, according to the state. For black students, it was 38 percent, and for Hispanics, it was 53 percent.
In addition, State Board of Education Chairwoman Kathleen Shanahan said that setting goals for different subgroups was needed to comply with terms of a waiver that Florida and 32 other states have from some provisions of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. These waivers were used to make the states independent from some federal regulations.
“We have set a very high goal for all students to reach in Florida,” Shanahan said.
But Palm Beach County School Board vice-chairwoman Debra Robinson isn’t buying the rationale.
“I’m somewhere between complete and utter disgust and anger and disappointment with humanity,” Robinson told the Post. She said she has been receiving complaints from upset black and Hispanic parents since the state board took its action this week.
Robinson called the state board’s actions essentially “proclaiming racism” and said she wants Palm Beach County to continue to educate every child with the same expectations, regardless of race. – CBS
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