{"id":85021,"date":"2015-04-15T13:04:20","date_gmt":"2015-04-15T11:04:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=85021"},"modified":"2015-04-15T13:04:20","modified_gmt":"2015-04-15T11:04:20","slug":"sa-bottom-of-global-maths-and-science-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/trending\/85021\/sa-bottom-of-global-maths-and-science-list\/","title":{"rendered":"SA bottom of global maths and science list"},"content":{"rendered":"

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has released<\/strong><\/a> its Global Information Technology Report 2015<\/strong><\/a>, which ranked South Africa last in the quality of mathematics and science education.<\/p>\n

South Africa also finished close to last \u2013 139 out of 143 countries \u2013 when looking at the overall quality of its education system.<\/p>\n

The WEF\u2019s Global Information Technology Report 2015 ranks SA\u2019s mathematics and science education quality lower than Angola, the Dominican Republic, and Mozambique.<\/p>\n

It should be noted that these rankings are based on the perceptions of\u00a0business leaders, and make use of the WEF\u2019s annual \u201cExecutive Opinion Survey\u201d to establish how well a country\u2019s education system is performing.<\/p>\n

In this survey the opinions of business leaders are gathered on a variety of topics.<\/p>\n

The WEF\u2019s education quality rankings are therefore not an assessment of the actual quality of mathematics and science education (see\u00a0Is SA bottom of the class in maths and science?<\/strong><\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"Mathematics<\/a>

Mathematics and Science education<\/p><\/div>\n

Why SA\u2019s education system is seen as poor<\/h3>\n

It is not difficult to see why South African business leaders think we have one of the worst education systems in the world.<\/p>\n

The Trends in Mathematics and Science Studies (TIMSS) results show that South Africa\u2019s performance is very close to the bottom of the surveyed countries.<\/p>\n

South Africa\u2019s poor performance in mathematics and science education quality was highlighted in the first three TIMSS reports \u2013 1995, 1999, and 2002.<\/p>\n

What happened in 2002 is that grade nine students in South Africa started to write the grade eight tests.<\/p>\n

The reason was simple: the grade eight TIMSS assessment was too difficult for eighth grade students in South Africa.<\/p>\n

In 2011 South Africa was only one of three countries \u2013 along with\u00a0Botswana and Honduras \u2013 where grade nine students did the grade eight tests.<\/p>\n

\"TIMMS<\/a>

TIMMS from 1995<\/p><\/div>\n

This did not do much to improve SA\u2019s overall ranking. South Africa\u2019s performance was so poor that the grade eight students of all the participating countries, except Ghana, outperformed South Africa\u2019s grade nine students.<\/p>\n

\u201cA striking feature of the mathematics and science scores is that the average scale score of the top seven countries exceeds South African performance at the 95th percentile,\u201d the Human Science Research Council stated.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis means that the most proficient learners in South Africa approached the average performance in Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Republic of Korea, Japan, Finland, Slovenia and Russian Federation.\u201d<\/p>\n

To put South Africa\u2019s latest TIMSS results in context \u2013 our grade nine students performed worse than grade eight students in other developing countries such as Morocco, Indonesia, Tunisia and Lebanon.<\/p>\n

This\u00a0should concern the country\u2019s education department.<\/p>\n

\"TIMSS\"<\/a>

TIMSS<\/p><\/div>\n

This article was republished with permission from MyBroadband<\/a>.<\/p>\n

More on education<\/h3>\n

SA education system among worst in the world<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Disturbing maths results among SA matriculants<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

SA last in new global maths and science ranking<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

South Africa\u2019s mathematics and science education quality was ranked as the worst in the world by the World Economic Forum\u2019s Global Information Technology Report 2015.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":63441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26,8071,5265,1941],"class_list":["post-85021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trending","tag-headline","tag-maths","tag-science","tag-world-economic-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85021"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":85029,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85021\/revisions\/85029"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}