Towards quality and equitable education in South Africa: Unpacking the relationship between teacher factors, students’ socioeconomic background and mathematics achievements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study sought to understand the relationship between teacher factors, students' socioeconomic background and mathematics achievements in South African context. This study contributes to educational quality and equity research in South Africa. Applying a two-level structural equation modelling technique, a sample of 334 mathematics teachers and 12,514 students from 292 schools in South Africa grade 9 (TIMSS) 2015 was used. The results revealed that teacher qualification and characteristics and instructional quality do not affect student mathematics achievement, once the student's family SES and classroom SES compositions were taken into account. The classroom SES composition explained almost 80% of the cross-classroom differences in mathematics achievement differences in South Africa, indicating a high level of socio-economic segregation between classrooms in mathematics achievement. A tentative explanation might be that qualified and experienced teachers are more likely to be self-selected to schools and classes where the best students are. Moreover, since student's achievement level is related to their socio-economic background. High achieving schools and classrooms very often are also with students of a higher level of SES. Thus, in South Africa, the teacher effects are confounded with SES composition effect. These results are discussed, and policy implications and practice recommendations of the findings are suggested.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".