Instructional Practice and Teaching Enactment in the Early Grade Reading Study in South Africa

• In Event: Highlighted Session: South Africa’s Early Grade Reading Study: Three levels of findings from large-scale research on interventions to improve foundational literacy

Proposal

Learner literacy levels in South Africa are in a dire state, with the largest majority of learners not being able to read for meaning by the end of Grade 4 (Spaull, et al., 2016). Given the socio-economic disparities in educational outcomes in South Africa, this problem is also more acute among poorer learners (Howie, et al., 2012). There is a growing recognition that more effort is required to disrupt the systemic dysfunctionality among the majority of poorer schools to provide increased learning opportunities for poor learners. One of the core assumptions in the theory of change in the study of system-wide instructional improvement is that external interventions lead to changes in teachers’ instructional practice which in turn lead to changes in learner achievement or outcomes. The key research question of this study is therefore to determine whether teacher instructional practice has changed as a result of two different external interventions.
In a randomised control trial led by the Department of Basic Education, in partnership with the University of the Witwatersrand, the cost-effectiveness of three different early grade reading interventions were evaluated. The main purpose of the Early Grade Reading Study (EGRS) is to determine the impact of curriculum aligned daily lesson plans, quality learning materials and capacity building on learner outcomes.
The quantitative study collected extensive and rigorous evidence of changes in learner outcomes from the baseline to the endline and between treatments and control schools, but generated little systematic and robust evidence on possible changes in teacher practice. To remedy this critical gap, a classroom observation study was conducted to assess the impact that the interventions had on instructional practice. The study entailed the observation of Grade 2 Setswana lessons in 20 Intervention 1 schools (schools that only received the conventional training), 20 Intervention 2 schools (schools that received continuous support from reading coaches) and 20 control schools. In addition to the observations, data was systematically collected of classroom and learning artefacts and semi-structured interviews were conducted with teachers. The purpose of this approach is to provide a more descriptive narrative about the marginal impact of the interventions on teachers’ instructional practices and enactment of the interventions.
The EGRS programme has been designed with a high degree of specificity or prescriptiveness. However, given that the enacted instructional regime will inevitably differ from the intended instructional regime (Raubenbush, 2005), this paper sets out to first establish which areas of the programme teachers enacted as instructed, and secondly how the enacted instructional regime in the treatment schools differed from the instructional regime in the control schools. Understanding the mechanisms which affected changed teacher instructional practices will provide valuable information to planning the expansion and scale-up of these intervention.

Authors

• Janeli Kotze, Department of Basic Education

• Jacobus Cilliers, Georgetown University