Understanding and comparing student learning in southern Africa

Abstract

This special issue of Prospects, guest-edited by Martin Carnoy, reports the results of a major study comparing student learning in primary schools in the border region of two neighbouring countries: South Africa’s North West Province and South East Botswana. Like several other recent studies, it tries to identify schooling factors within countries that significantly impact student achievement. This research, however, distinguishes itself by honing in on learners who are physically proximate, culturally and socio-economically similar, and attending the same grade in two different school systems. It especially focuses on the characteristics of teachers and teaching that may contribute to learning gains in grade 6 in a group of lower and lower middle income schools shaped in different historical settings. The articles included in this special issue have important implications not just for education policy in developing countries, but also for the methodology used to study an education process in almost any country, developing or developed. The research is classroom-based, and the articles that make up this issue of Prospects detail the classroom process that the underlying study found to be important to understanding why, in some classrooms, even low-income students learn more. Key data on learning, teacher skills, the schooling process, and the schooling environment help us understand better how students in the two countries learn mathematics, and what they learn. These insights, as Martin Carnoy highlights in his Introduction to this special issue, go far beyond those in other studies of schooling, even most studies outside southern Africa. The underlying theory is that student learning is a complex function that includes many factors: the student’s human and cultural capital, the teacher’s capacity to teach the subject matter (content and pedagogical knowledge), the cognitive demands teachers make of students in the classroom, the amount of time spent on the subject matter (curriculum mandated by the state), the quality of the teachers’ pedagogy in the classroom, and classroom peer conditions that influence learning. Although the neighbouring populations of students have similar characteristics, the two countries differ greatly in the histories of their educational systems: Botswana gained independence in 1966 and pursued as a