The Impact at The Centre of Science and Technology
The Centre of Science and Technology (COSAT) is a quintile 3 school which decided to focus their efforts on a smaller group of students due to their ICT constraints. They chose 33 of their weakest Grade 9s as their target group with the aim of helping them to catch up the significant gaps so that they could pass the year. This was particularly important as the school does not offer Maths Literacy in the FET phase and, as such, if students failed Maths in Grade 9 they could run the risk of dropping out of the school. The group received access two periods per week over the course of a term.
Although the group has focused most of its time on the Numbers topic, the group of students managed to catch up a 1 full grade of understanding, on average, over the course of a single school term. There was a 38% increase in the proportion of students that are at the required level (from 28% to 63%), with the majority of the students almost finished Numbers and half approximately halfway through their catch-up for Fractions.
Since Numbers is the most foundational topic to all others, it led to an emphatic impact on school marks. Below are tables comparing the 9E class to the 2021’s weakest learners at COSAT, looking at their respective marks over a two-year period.
The first thing to note is that the 2022 9E class is a far weaker cohort than the previous year’s. In Grade 8, they were 27% behind the 2021 cohort (25% vs 52%). Over the course of a year, the 2021 cohort improved their marks by 6% (52% to 58%), however the 2022 9E class were significantly better shown by their improvement of 19% (25% to 44%). This means that the gap between the two cohorts has been halved over the course of a single year.
When examining whether the focus group was successful with its aim of helping these students pass, we see that 70% of the 2021 cohort were passing in Grade 8 whereas only 6% of the 2022 9E class were passing. A year later, the 2021 cohort had improved this figure by 18%, however the 2022 9E class were far more improved with an additional 52% of the class passing.
With an improvement of 19% in Term 3 marks and a 52% increase in the proportion of learners passing, it is clear that the catch-up programme has had a highly significant impact on the Grade 9E class at COSAT. They now envision expanding this to the rest of their Grade 8s and 9s.
“At the beginning of the year, all of these learners were failing mathematics. The moment you see yourself passing Maths on your own, it’s a booster. You can’t jump several floors at once, but slowly mathematics becomes one of your subjects. For some learners where you thought there was no hope at all, you can now see hope.”
