Venter Lieschen
Department of Logistics, Stellenbosch University, Room 3026, Van der Sterr Building, Victoria Street, Stellenbosch, 7600 South Africa.
Int J Child Care Educ Policy. 2022;16(1):7. doi: 10.1186/s40723-022-00100-5. Epub 2022 Jun 29.
South Africa's basic education system is dysfunctional. It scores last or close to last in a myriad of metrics and delivers learners with some of the worst literacy and numeracy competencies worldwide. A bimodal distribution in the results exists when learners from the richest socioeconomic quintile are performing adequately well, while learners from the poorest quintiles are failing. This paper presents a system dynamics simulation model to describe the causal linkages between improved early childhood and pre-school learning practices on the education system as a whole. The paper investigates the difference in performance between rich and poor communities. Three interventions explore the research question of whether it is the number of enrolments into early childhood development programs that increases a cohort's school readiness, or rather the quality of the early childhood development programs into which they were enrolled. The results answer the research question for the Western Cape province by showing that increasing the quality of the formal ECD programs leads to a greater percentage of school-ready five year olds than increasing the percentage of enrolled children, but that decreasing community poverty leads to better results than either intervention. The results show the simulation model to be a powerful tool to assist with policy setting and intervention testing for any other province or country by simply changing the input data and calibration.
南非的基础教育体系运转失灵。在众多衡量标准中，它排名垫底或接近垫底，为学习者提供的读写和算术能力在全球处于最差水平之列。当来自社会经济最富裕五分之一群体的学习者表现相当不错，而来自最贫困五分之一群体的学习者却不及格时，成绩呈现出双峰分布。本文提出了一个系统动力学模拟模型，以描述改善幼儿期和学前学习实践与整个教育系统之间的因果联系。本文调查了富裕社区和贫困社区在表现上的差异。三项干预措施探讨了这样一个研究问题：是幼儿发展项目的入学人数增加提高了一批儿童的入学准备程度，还是他们所参加的幼儿发展项目的质量起到了这样的作用。研究结果回答了西开普省的这个研究问题，表明提高正规幼儿发展项目的质量比增加入学儿童的比例能使更多五岁儿童做好入学准备，但减少社区贫困比任何一项干预措施都能产生更好的效果。结果表明，该模拟模型是一个强大的工具，通过简单改变输入数据和校准，就能协助任何其他省份或国家进行政策制定和干预测试。
