Description
This report describes the 2011 Annual National Assessments (ANA) process and discusses the pointers provided by this programme that should guide the actions of those involved in improving learning and teaching in the Foundation and Intermediate Phases (Grades 1 to 6) of South Africa’s schools. The analysis in the report should be regarded as initial analysis aimed at identifying broad patterns. Beyond this report, more detailed and specialised reports will emerge from the 2011 wave of ANA focussing on, for instance, learner performance patterns within individual districts and trends with respect to specific competencies described in the curriculum.
Section 2 of the report briefly discusses the nature of the educational quality challenge in our schools as well as the recent history of national assessments in South Africa. Section 3 describes the purpose of ANA and specifically how ANA is expected to result in improvements in the quality of teaching and learning. Section 4
outlines the planning and implementation steps of the 2011 wave of ANA, including problems encountered and how these should inform future waves of the programme. Steps beyond this report that form part of the 2011 wave of ANA are also described. Section 5 sums up the key limitations of the data analysed for this report. Section 6 provides the results of the analysis of the 2011 ANA data. Section 7 sums up what the lessons emerging from ANA 2011 are and how ANA can be improved in coming years. Section 8 provides a
conclusion.
The Foundation Phase (Grades 1 to 3) subjects assessed in ANA are literacy and numeracy. In the Intermediate Phase (Grades 4 to 6) the subjects are languages and mathematics. For the sake of brevity, in this report the term ‘languages’ may refer to both literacy and languages. Similarly, ‘mathematics’ may refer to both numeracy
and mathematics.
