The difficulty level of a national assessment of Grade 9 mathematics: The case of five schools

South African Journal of Childhood Education

 
 
Field Value
 
Title The difficulty level of a national assessment of Grade 9 mathematics: The case of five schools
 
Creator Bansilal, Sarah
 
Subject assessment ANA; mathematics; assessments; Grade 9 Mathematics Education
Description The introduction of the Annual National Assessment (ANA) programme by the South African education department was met with much resistance from unions with some stating that it is not matched well to the curriculum. In this small-scale study, I compare the differences in outcomes between the internal summative assessment and the ANA for Grade 9 learners from five schools. The results indicate that the learners’ results from the final exam were statistically significantly higher than that from the ANA for all five schools. This suggests that the ANA was considerably more difficult than the schools’ assessments. However, the learners’ scores in each of the two assessments were strongly correlated, suggesting that both tests assessed similar skills. Interviews with the teachers suggested that some of the reasons for the lower results in the ANA were that the test was too long, some instructions were not clear, the timing in September was not ideal and there were too many higher level questions. It is hoped that the results from this study could be used by the education department to improve the functioning of the assessment programme.
 
Publisher AOSIS
 
Contributor
Date 2017-03-30
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — case study
Format text/html application/epub+zip application/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/sajce.v7i1.412
 
Source South African Journal of Childhood Education; Vol 7, No 1 (2017); 8 pages 2223-7682 2223-7674
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/412/475 https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/412/474 https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/412/476 https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/412/473
 
Coverage - - 14-15 years
Rights Copyright (c) 2017 Sarah Bansilal https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
ADVERTISEMENT