The comparative performance of chartered accountancy students in South Africa: The impact of historical legacies

African students continue to underperform in South Africa's schools and universities. This paper investigates the comparative performance of African chartered accountancy students from school to post-university level. The paper employed a mixed-method approach to analyse a series of cross-sectional datasets. The results showed that African students have underperformed at school, university and at post-university level, although the performance gap appears to be narrowing in the first professional chartered accountancy examination. The differential performance of these students was explained by poorer marks in mathematics and English that can be traced back to historical legacies in the education sector. South African universities, moreover, perpetuate this disadvantage because they have retained Eurocentric teaching approaches. In order to remove these barriers, tuition at school and university must be complemented by cross-cultural teaching practices and bridging programmes.     

Computer technology in education: Evidence from a pooled study of computer assisted learning programs among rural students in China

There is a great degree of heterogeneity among the studies that investigate whether computer technologies improve education and how students benefit from them – if at all. The overall goal of this study is to assess the effectiveness of computing technologies to raise educational performance and non-cognitive outcomes and identify what program components are most effective in doing so. To achieve this aim we pool the data sets of five separate studies about computer technology programs that include observations of 16,856 students from 171 primary schools across three provinces in China. We find that overall computing technologies have positive and significant impacts on student academic achievement in both math and in Chinese. The programs are found to be more effective if they are implemented out-of-school, avoiding what appear to be substitution effects when programs are run during school. The programs also have heterogeneous effects by gender. Specifically, boys gain more than girls in Chinese. We did not find heterogeneous effects by student initial achievement levels. We also found that the programs that help students learn math—but not Chinese—have positive impacts on student self-efficacy.     

The academic effectiveness of a bridging year for commerce undergraduates

Human resources development in South Africa is constrained by the underpreparedness of many students for university. The problem is particularly acute among school leavers for whom English is not their first language and who are thereby at a disadvantage in an English language university. In order to address the problem, which goes beyond language, bridging curricula have been devised. This research analyses how effective one such intervention is, in terms of an academic achievement outcome.

Decisions to allocate resources to bridging intervention need the assurance that the resources are used effectively. An ex post facto experimental research design ts used in this study to test the learning outcome of the PBS bridging intervention. The analysis assesses whether the PBS programme increases the academic achievement of students at first‐year level.

The examination results achieved by an experimental group of PBS students who matriculated from DET schools are compared with the results of a control group of DET matriculants. The research shows that the academic achievements of the PBS group during the bridging year were superior to those of the control group. Furthermore, superior performance was sustained by the PBS students after they Joined the mainstream BCom curriculum. After the bridging intervention, the PBS students achieved 7.7 percentage points better in Business Economics I examinations than the control group. The research design controls for demonstrated academic ability at school At a 0.01 level of statistical significance, the results of the analysis indicate that the PBS intervention has contributed positively to the students’ academic achievement.     

Finding the fat: The relative impact of budget fluctuations on African-American schools

On average, per pupil expenditures were much lower in schools attended by African-American children than in schools attended by whites during the period of de jure segregation. Little is known, however, about what motivated school boards to maintain this inequality or why they funded African-American schools at all. Using newly collected data on schools in early twentieth-century Georgia and exploiting a funding shock resulting from the rules regarding appropriations from the State School Fund, this paper examines how school boards divvied up the proceeds of exogenous shifts in school budgets by race. In response to a one dollar per pupil budget cut, instructional expenditures in white schools fell by $1.21 per pupil, while they remained almost unchanged in African-American schools. Thus, whites, rather than African Americans, bore the brunt of budget cuts, indicating that there was little fat to trim from the budgets of African-American schools.     

Are Charters the Best Alternative? A Cost Frontier Analysis of Alternative Education Campuses in Texas

Previous research on the relative efficiency of charter schools focused on schools that serve a general student population. In Texas, as in many other states, some charter schools have been designed specifically to serve students who are at risk of dropping out of school. Such “alternative education campuses” may have very different cost and efficiency profiles than schools designed to serve students in regular education programs. In this article, we estimate a translog stochastic cost frontier model using panel data for alternative public high school campuses in Texas over the five‐year period 2007–2011, and find that alternative education high school campuses operated by charter schools are systematically more efficient than alternative education high school campuses operated by traditional public school districts. Policies that encourage the formation of alternative education charter campuses may thus be a sensible component of strategies to combat the pervasive and pernicious problem of high school dropouts.     

Returns to private and public education in Bangladesh and Pakistan: A comparative analysis

This paper documents wage differentials between private and public school graduates in Bangladesh and Pakistan. While evidence in support of a wage advantage of private school graduates in Bangladesh is lacking, Pakistani private school graduates are found to earn more than their public school counterparts. This finding has important implications for the current debate over the effectiveness of private schools in South Asia. To the extent the wage premium arises owing to education in private schools, our result suggests relative superiority of private schools in Pakistan and are consistent with extant studies that have assessed private school quality using test scores of students. The difference in the performance of private schools in the two countries, however, remains a puzzle. This difference, we conjecture, may be partly explained by the between-country differences in public policy towards private schools and, therefore, the regulatory regime facing these schools.     

The evolution of educational inequalities through secondary school: Evidence from a South African panel study

Schooling outcomes in South Africa are characterised by significant inequalities on the basis of race and socio-economic status. This paper reports on findings from a unique panel dataset that follows individuals who participated in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study in 2002 as Grade 8 students through to their secondary school-leaving examination (known as ‘matric’) in Grade 12. The paper investigates the extent to which secondary schools differ in converting Grade 8 achievement into matric outcomes. Achievement in Grade 8 is strongly predictive of survival to matric, passing matric and performance in matric. Many students had extremely weak mathematical proficiency in Grade 8 and yet decided to take matric mathematics, only to fail the subject. Increasing the number of matric mathematics passes is a strong policy imperative. Our analysis suggests that the way to achieve this is to improve mathematics learning at earlier stages of the school programme rather than through indiscriminate mathematics participation in matric.     

Compensating for academic loss: Online learning and student performance during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to widespread school shutdowns, with many continuing distance education via online-learning platforms. We here estimate the causal effects of online education on student exam performance using administrative data from Chinese Middle Schools. Taking a difference-in-differences approach, we find that receiving online education during the COVID-19 lockdown improved student academic results by 0.22 of a standard deviation, relative to pupils without learning support from their school. Not all online education was equal: students who were given recorded online lessons from external higher-quality teachers had higher exam scores than those whose lessons were recorded by teachers from their own school. The educational benefits of distance learning were the same for rural and urban students, but the exam performance of students who used a computer for online education was better than those who used a smartphone. Last, while everyone except the very-best students performed better with online learning, it was low achievers who benefited from teacher quality.     

Measuring the Impact of Socio-Economic Factors on School Efficiency in Australia

This paper examines the productive efficiency of government schools in New South Wales (NSW) in Australia. The study uses a technical inefficiency effects model applied to a unique three-year panel dataset containing 1235 primary and 371 secondary schools in NSW. A stochastic frontier production function and an inefficiency effects function that control for school socioeconomic and environmental factors are estimated. The dataset contains information on various school inputs, school expenditures by major functional area, parental socioeconomic characteristics, student characteristics, and standardized test scores. We examine the degree to which school and non-school educational inputs influence student achievement scores and find that, overall, primary schools are 88.6% and secondary schools 96.4% efficient. The index describing community socio-educational advantage has the most significant influence on students’ achievement scores.     

Reconstructing rural education: Planning for equal access to rural schools in the North West Province

The eighteen former apartheid education departments in South Africa now fall under the authority of a single ministry. However, the full integration of various education authorities at the district and local levels within a unified delivery system that maximises non‐racial access to rural schools, has yet to be accomplished. A study was initiated in the rural Marico and Lehurutshe regions of the North West Province to investigate how equitable access to rural schools on a non‐racial basis could be achieved, and to identify practical constraints on systems of delivery. Over 100 schools in the study area were mapped using Geographical Information Systems technology. It is clear that the characteristics of the education system inherited from the apartheid past will impede the reconstruction of rural education. In order to plan accurately for compulsory schooling, planners will need more detailed population data on out‐of‐school students. They will also have to take into account local geographical features and economic growth nodes near which schools may be placed in order to maximise efficiency and accessibility.     

工学结合背景下高职院校外语专业教师可持续发展研究

工学结合是将学习与工作结合在一起的教育模式,主体包括学生、企业、学校。它以职业为导向,充分利用学校内、外不同的教育环境和资源,把以课堂教学为主的学校教育和直接获取实际经验的校外工作有机结合,贯穿于学生的培养过程之中。工学结合背景下高职院校外语专业教师的可持续发展,可从教师应具备的意识、职业技能、基本要素和发展方法等方面进行探讨。     

The Assessment: Education

Research on the economics of education increasingly influencesthe design of education policy. The framework for the analysisis provided by human capital theory, in which education is interpretedas an investment, raising the future productivity of the individualand bringing other private and social benefits. Estimates ofthe private and social returns to education, and of the effectivenessof schools and teachers, can be used to guide the allocationof resources within the public sector; in addition, policy reformsin the UK have attempted to make public providers of educationmore responsive to the preferences of parents and students.There is evidence that pupil attainment has risen in recentyears, but that the education system fails to provide equalityof access or opportunity and may reinforce social and economicinequality.     

Eggs versus chewable vitamins: Which intervention can increase nutrition and test scores in rural China?

Despite growing wealth and a strengthening commitment from the government to provide quality education, a significant share of students across rural China still have inadequate access to micronutrient-rich regular diets. Such poor diets can lead to nutritional problems, such as iron-deficiency anemia, that can adversely affect attention and learning in school. Large scale policies in Northwestern China have attempted to tackle these nutritional problems using eggs. The overall goal of this paper is to assess the impact of the government's egg distribution program by comparing the effect on anemia rates of an intervention that gives students an egg per day versus an intervention that gives students a chewable vitamin per day. We will also assess whether either intervention leads to improved educational performance among students in poor areas of rural China. To meet this goal, we report on the results of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving over 2600 fourth grade students from 70 randomly-chosen elementary schools in 5 of the poorest counties in Gansu Province in China's poor Northwest region. The design called for random assignment of schools to one of two intervention groups, or a control group with no intervention. One intervention provided a daily chewable vitamin, including 5 mg of iron. The other mimicked the government policy by providing a daily egg. According to the findings of the paper, in the schools that received the chewable vitamins, hemoglobin (Hb) levels rose by more than 2 g/L (over 0.2 standard deviations). The standardized math test scores of students in these schools also improved significantly. In schools that received eggs, there was no significant effect on Hb levels or math test scores. Overall, these results should encourage China's Ministry of Education (MOE) to look beyond eggs when tackling nutritional problems related to anemia in an education setting.     

Do education vouchers prevent dropout at private high schools? Evidence from Japanese policy changes

Although education voucher programs for students attending private high schools have existed in Japan for decades, to date there have been no studies that examine their effectiveness. In this study, we estimate the programs’ preventative effect on dropout by using school-track level (academic or vocational) panel data covering all high schools in northern Japan. Prefectural governments have faced increasing dropout rates stemming from financial difficulties, and expanded the scope and amount of their private high school tuition support programs since the late 1990s. We use this variation to identify the effect of tuition support on students’ dropout decisions, controlling for initial academic ability of students entering the schools and unobservable school-track effects. We also apply the instrumental variable method to account for the possible endogeneity of policy changes. Our results suggest that increasing tuition support is particularly effective in preventing the dropout of private high school students on nonacademic tracks.     

IDENTIFYING SOME CONSTRAINTS IN FIRST YEAR ECONOMICS TEACHING AND LEARNING AT A TYPICAL SOUTH AFRICAN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

This paper examines possible determinants of economics 1 performance at the Riverside campus of the Durban Institute of Technology. The study finds that high school subjects taken, age and gender are not significantly associated with economics achievement. Learner motivation, however, does appear to be associated with economics performance. Specifically, learners may find it difficult to relate meaningfully to the discipline's real content at least partly as a consequence of the philosophical framework within which it is delivered and partly because they do not have the textbook. A well‐designed learner guide and workbook could go some way to demonstrating the relevance of economics and instilling in students more effective learning methods. The result could be a virtuous cycle of improved performance and greater learner motivation.     

Investment in Indian education: Uneconomic?

In a country where the literacy rate is only 3 in 10, some believe that there is an economic surplus of education. This paper reviews the arguments. In sum, India represents a case in which the presence of unemployment has led observers to the unjustified assumption that the external productivity of education is low. The paper uses new techniques of educational planning: the distribution of per pupil expenditures, examination pass-rates, rate of literacy, trade training, the availability of books, the amount of knowledge acquired in schools and the degree of impact of school resources on academic achievement. From each of these sources, the paper concludes that there is reason to question the widely held belief that additional investment in Indian education would be uneconomic.     

Is rented accommodation a good choice for primary school students' academic performance? – Evidence from rural China

Rented accommodation has increased rapidly in the past decade in rural areas since the school consolidation policy was implemented in China at the turn of the 21^st century. This paper provides the first impact evaluation of rented accommodation on primary school students' academic performance by employing a double robust estimator with multivalued treatments. Using a unique survey of Grades 4 and 5 students in Shaanxi Province in 2013, we find that 22% of students lived in rented accommodation near their schools. Compared with students living in boarding school or at home, students living in rented accommodation, on average, have higher math test scores, and the positive effect is stronger for boys than girls. These results have important implications for the design of rural school policy.     

Increasing Finance,Improving Schools

Much debate from many political sides has ensued to raise attention to the struggle state legislatures face over school finance issues. This study examines the changes in academic achievement, before and after increases in funding occur, to show that money does matter. The uniqueness of this study is that it examines per pupil funding and academic achievement test scores, Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), not at the aggregated school district level, but at the neighborhood school level. Using data from Dallas County public schools, we are able to see that even within school districts, as resources increase, achievement improves.

The education of migrant children in China's urban public elementary schools: Evidence from Shanghai

The education of migrant children critically determines the level of human capital of China's future labor force. The majority of migrant children in Chinese cities now study in public schools. This paper uses self-collected data in Shanghai in 2010 and 2012 to evaluate the performance of migrant students in public elementary schools. We find that across schools, migrant students with better family background enter into schools with higher quality. Within the same schools, migrant students perform as well as their local counterparts, in both cognitive and non-cognitive dimensions. Our results suggest that there is no evidence of within-school discrimination against migrant students within public schools, and the key to improving their education is access to better schools.     

Teachers’ unions and industrial action in South African primary schools: Exploring their impacts on learning

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates a disruption hypothesis that student learning is lost as a direct consequence of teacher strike action in South Africa. At face value estimates from a within-student across-subject analysis suggest that teacher strike participation negatively affects learning for students in the poorest three quarters of schools. Strike action also limits access to nutrition as school closures prevent student participation in daily school feeding programmes. However, despite controlling for student and school level factors that may drive teacher selection into strike participation, unobserved teacher characteristics continue to bias estimates. Assuming that selection on observable characteristics can tell us something about selection on unobservable characteristics, there is an implied negative selection of teachers into strike participation.