What We Learnt
- The personalised catch-up approach can be scaled across multiple schools and provinces to achieve significant results with only the weekly support of a facilitator.
- The approach lends itself to an implementation that assures student engagement to a greater degree.
- Studenta engaged more deeply with their mathematics, working slower with better precision and greater perseverance when part of the catch-up process.
The Background
Since July 2017, the Telkom Foundation has invested its resources into supporting seven schools across the Gauteng and Eastern Cape areas. Their holistic programme includes upgrading infrastructure, providing teacher training and academic intervention, and psychosocial support for students to prepare them for the tertiary environment. In terms of Maths, the project aims to increase the number of learners choosing core Mathematics in the final years of schooling while improving attainment.
The Baseline Results
Initial baseline assessments were conducted with more than 1700 Grade 9 and 10 students at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018 across the seven schools. It was found that the majority of students were between Grade 3 and 6 level (69%) with 3% below Grade 3 level and 1% effectively ready for Grade 10. It was also observed that 93% of students had low metacognitive skills, while 77% of students were positive toward Maths. While 81% of students completed the assessment at a pace required of them for school test, almost every learner exhibited significant careless errors.
The Intervention: Building For The Future
The existing programme was already implementing Saturday morning support for students through external tutors in one–hour sessions. Recognising the need for students to interact with the catch–up content for longer than these one–hour sessions, the intervention was designed to provide personalised catch–up material in print form based on the initial diagnostics that could be worked through during the week by students independently. Facilitated Saturday sessions would act as a point for accountability and peer–tutoring of continued areas of struggle in future.
The Improvements in Maths
At the time of writing, approximately 1000 summative assessments had been completed having worked through the catch–up content for the Numbers thread. These showed that 35% of the students improved by 1 grade–level or more in the six month period (twice the expected rate of learning), with 6% of them improving by 2 grade–levels or more (four times the expected rate of learning). The spread of improvements indicates that any learner has the ability improve significantly.
Learner Engagement Moderator
It was reported by tutors that many of the students did not complete the material during the week, possibly as a result of student fatigue from the greater programme and/or the lesser–structured nature of the implementation. Unfortunately, engagement at student level could not be tracked to examine this further but it suggests the reasoning for the distribution of improvements.
Improved Numbers Knowledge
The Numbers thread (consisting of 20 of the 81 concepts) was the sole focus on the intervention. This showed an increase of 11% on average with quarter of the students improving by 20% of more. There was a significant increase in the number of learners having achieved suitable mastery of 70% of the content (from 16% to 34%).
Improved Learning Behaviours
It was reported by tutors that many of the students did not complete the material during the week, possibly as a result of students fatigue from the greater programme and/or the lesser–structured nature of the implementation. Unfortunately, engagement at student level could not be tracked to examine this further but it suggests the reasoning for the distribution of improvements.
