Base-Line Assessment in Lesotho

Base-line assessment in Lesotho: some preliminary observations

Tony Harries University of Durham

Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, University of Lisbon, 11-14 September 2002

Introduction

Lesotho is small country about the size of Belgium. It has a population of about 2.3 million and its economy is very closely tied of that of South Africa which completely surrounds it. The close links mean that many students take up opportunities to study and work in South Africa. The capital city Maseru is situated on the western border of the country and has a border crossing directly into the Free State. Communication in the lowlands of Lesotho is good, but as one moves through the foothills into the mountain areas this becomes more difficult. In the mountain areas some locations are only accessible by horse or foot.

Education in Lesotho

Lesotho is one of the poorest counties in the World with nearly half the population living below the poverty line. It is grouped among the 49 Least Developed Countries an was ranked at 120 out of 162 countries on the UN Development Programme Human Development Index. ( 2002). Although it is a poor country it considers that education is a high priority, but suffers from high drop-out rates as schooling progresses (Gay et al 1995, p. 65). There are many problems identified with both the training of teachers and the classroom conditions within which the teachers work (Gay et al 1995, p. 65). The government is making sterling efforts, in difficult circumstances, to develop the education system for the benefit of all the citizens.

The government in Lesotho is responsible for Primary (7 years), Secondary (3 years), High School (2 years), and tertiary education. For the purpose of initial teacher education and in-service training there are three main bodies involved.

The Education Faculty of the National University of Lesotho;
The Institute of Education at the National University of Lesotho;
The National Teacher Training College.

In addition there are district education centres which provide some in-service support across primary and secondary sectors, and 5 National Resource Centres which provide support for secondary in-service work.

The courses offered at these institutions are:

National University of Lesotho

BEd secondary – a 4 year course focusing on the Humanities
Diploma in agriculture and Home Economics – 2 years
BSc (Ed) in Science and Mathematics – 4 years
PGCE – 1 year

Institute of Education

B.Ed Primary – part-time course lasting about 6 years and validated by the Faculty of Education. This course is relatively new and is just completing its first year. About 250 teachers started the course but there was large drop-out/failure rate. Much of this seems to be due to the time commitment required – the course includes in the first year two full-time blocks of 6 and 4 weeks in addition to some weekend schools. For some teachers the travelling required for this is extremely difficult. Further the nature of the course seems to be a little inappropriate in places where the focus is on advanced subject knowledge rather than pedagogical knowledge. This is recognised by the course team and a review of the requirements is underway.

NTTC

Diploma in Primary Education – 3 year course on leadership in primary schools (requires 2 years experience)
Diploma in Education Primary – 3.5 year course on primary school teaching
Secondary teaching certificate – 3 year course for prospective secondary teachers who will be able to teach to junior certificate level. (it is planned to phase out this course and replace it with the diploma course below).
Diploma in Education Secondary – a 3.5 year course for prospective secondary teachers who will be able to teach to O level.
Diploma in Technology Education – a 3 year course for prospective technology teachers.

Of these courses, they all require at least 4 credits in COSC (Cambridge Overseas certificate), except the first course which is a post experience course.

Schools in Lesotho

In Lesotho virtually all the schools are church schools. This means that whilst the government provides the salaries for teachers on the basis of 1 teacher for a year group of 55 pupils the schools are managed by the appropriate church group. If the school decides to take more pupils then it results in larger classes or the school has to pay for extra staff. At present the number of schools are as below:

Primary – about 1283 schools of which about 96% are church schools;

Secondary and High Schools – about 216 of which about 90% are church schools;

Class sizes range from 20 to about 150

In the primary sector the government is pursuing a laudable policy of delivering free primary schooling for all pupils in Lesotho. Partly as a result of this there is a difficulty with provision of an appropriate number of teachers for the system. At present it is estimated that that about 25-30% of the teachers in the primary sector are unqualified. A further problem is the drop-out rate from primary schools – the latest statistics suggest that the drop-out rate may be up to 40% by the end of Year 6, and that 50% of initial primary pupils fail to qualify for secondary school (Williams 1998).

The Study

Background

Over the last three years students from the School of Education at Durham have spent 4-6 weeks, at the end of their course, in Lesotho working in primary schools as an extra school experience. The experiences thus far have been in the capital city Maseru, a small town, Morija, about 50 Km South of Maseru, and in a remote rural area Lipering, south west of Mohale’s Hoek.

Over the last two years as part of the experience, the students have undertaken some preliminary work on base-line assessment using the PIPS baseline assessment material. As preparation for this they were all given some training in the use of the materials and the way the forms needed to be filled in. In Lesotho itself as the work had been undertaken previously the student were asked to find – in consultation with the teachers - the most appropriate way of working with the pupils. In the first year they needed to experiment with he use of a translator whereas in the second year the experience of the first group was used in order to use a similar medium of delivery for all pupils – ie a tape recording of the questions.

Context

The tests took place over a two year period. The first set of tests were completed in the town of Morija, and the second set of tests were completed this year in Maseru, the capital. There were two schools used in Morija – one was a private English medium school and the other was a free Sesotho medium school. The English medium school has a preparatory class and there is a nursery in the town which some of the pupils in Morija primary school had attended. The pupils tested are shown in the table below:

Table 1: First Year of study – pupils involved in the study

Morija Primary School / Morija English medium school
Year 1 (age: / Prep class / Year 1
Female / 10 / 21 / 15
Male / 14

The overall results are shown below when they were standardised for the start of reception in England:

Table II:First Year of study – Results standardised against start of reception

Morija Primary School / Morija English medium school
Mean / Interquartile range / Mean / Interquartile range
Early Reading / 48 / 16 / 40 / 13
Mathematics / 62 / 12 / 64 / 7

The overall result for the cohort of 60 pupils was:

Table III:First Year of study – Results standardised against start of reception for whole group

Mean / Interquartile range
Early Reading / 42 / 18
Mathematics / 63 / 10

These scores were very high for Mathematics in particular and so they were then standardised with end of reception as this was considered to represent an age group closer to that of the Lesotho pupils. The results are shown in the table below:

Table IV:First Year of study – Results standardised against end of reception

Morija Primary School / Morija English medium school
Mean / Interquartile range / Mean / Interquartile range
Early Reading / 32 / 10 / 27 / 8
Mathematics / 41 / 9 / 42 / 7

The overall result for the cohort of 60 pupils was approximately:

Table V:First Year of study – Results standardised against end of reception

Mean / Interquartile range
Early Reading / 30 / 9
Mathematics / 42 / 9

The two graphs below show the results in the form a box plot and a bar chart for the pupils in Standard 1 of Morija Primary School. The mean score for mathematics is shown to be about 41 with an interquartile range of about 9. Thus these results are significantly below what would be expected in English school at the end of reception. Similarly results for English are low. But this is to be expected as the assessment is in a second language. The bar graph shows that the mathematics appears to be the strongest aspect of the assessment, the early reading is weak but the phonics has some strength.

Table VI:First Year of study – Box plot of results standardised against end of reception

Table VI:First Year of study – bar chart of results standardised against end of reception
Second Year of Study

The pupils who were assessed in this second year of the project came from 3 schools in Maseru – the capital of Lesotho. This is shown in the table below:

Hoohlo Primary School / Masechille Primary School / St. Bernadette’s Primary School
Year 1 / Year 1 / Year 1
44 / 15 / 24

The box plot for these results is shown below.

The table shows that the mean score for early mathematics was about 38 with an interquartile range of about 8. This is similar to the results from the previous year and again they are significantly below that expected from pupils at the end of reception in England. The early reading results are again understandably low.

The next table shows a bar chart of results for mathematics, early reading and phonics.

This table shows clearly that the strongest aspect of the test was the mathematics, the weakest was the early reading and there some strong showing in the phonics aspect of the test.

Comments:

General points

In the first year the tests were all administered on a to one to one basis by the students but in both schools they had access to a translator initially. This caused some problems as the students felt that they were not in control of information given to the students. Also they were never entirely sure whether the translations were accurate or whether inadvertently they gave the pupils extra help in interpreting the questions. Thus they made the decision to make a tape in Sesotho of the script that was required. For most of the pupils in the two schools these tapes were used for completing the test. In the second year with the pupils in Maseru tapes were used with all the pupils.

Two other general problems were identified by the students. The first was that some of the pupils interviewed were nervous as they were being taken out of the classroom and interviewed by white people with whom they were not well acquainted. This may have affected performance especially for the very youngest pupils. The second was the age of the pupils. Most of the pupils in the English medium school class were about 5/6 years old. In Standard 1 of Morija primary school the age range of the pupils is from 6 – 11 years although the oldest pupil was not interviewed. (The oldest pupil in the school was 21 years old). This could clearly affect the results as the older the pupils the broader their life experience might be – particularly when compared to pupils in England.

Mathematics and English comparisons

The results appear to indicate a substantial difference between the early reading and Mathematics, both in terms of mean scores and spread of results. The student comments may help to throw some light on the reasons for these differences.

The pictures were very westernised. For example the kitchen is quite different to that seen normally by Basotho children, and some of the foods seen in the pictures would again not be familiar to many pupils – eg cherries. Again wasp was not a word that was understood –pupils thought that it was a butterfly. Finally castles and windmills were not within the experience of the pupils. Thus the socio-cultural context had an effect. Further there was much dependence on English in this part of the test and clearly the English of both pupils and teachers was a problem. It is interesting to note that the Early reading scores were less in the English medium school than in Morija primary school – possibly due to age differences.

The ideas about reading were again affected by the socio-cultural experiences of the pupils. Many had little experience with books and so for some they had to be shown which way up to hold a book and where to start reading.

With the word questions there was clearly a pronunciation or accent difficulty with for example the pupils thinking that dog and duck were the same word.

In the mathematics part of the test the language difficulty was very small and this may be a reason for the higher scores. Most of the pupils were able to count and recognise numbers. The actual sums were completed correctly by most pupils and interestingly the students suggested that the subtraction sums were found to be easier. This resonates with some conclusions by Kerslake in the 1970s. A further point that is worth noting is that the pupils had difficulty with the concept of zero as a number.

Language

Language was clearly an important issue with this study. All the pupils were either working in a second language or were having to make sense of a language of which they understood very little indeed.

There were linguistic/cultural problems in using English. The pupils all were prepared to try pronouncing words but for example R is a difficult word for Basotho children to say as there appears to be no such sound in Sesotho. Again L is often pronounced as a D.

The repeating exercises were well done by the pupils in contrast to the rhyming question where it seemed that the idea of rhyming seemed to be beyond the experience of most of the pupils. It seemed to be unclear what might be a similar concept in Sesotho.

Some of the findings here are compatible with those found in a much more detailed study of South African pupils by Howie (2002). Amongst other findings she found a low English language proficiency with pupils who’s first tongue was an African language, many homes with few books, and the teachers’ proficiency in the language of learning was sometimes a difficulty.

Conclusions

There seem to be a number reasons as to why the work in Lesotho should be continued and developed.

It would be useful to try to understand why there may be a considerable difference between early reading and mathematics development. Whilst the mathematics questions seem to “cross cultures” the early reading questions need to be more culturally sensitive and possibly need designing by a Basotho national. It would need some work to explore whether there is a cultural interpretation of the concepts and ideas that are being assessed in the early reading test. As far as the mathematics is concerned it would be interesting to understand the early learning culture within which young Lesotho children grow up.

As far as the tests themselves are concerned they could serve as an objective indicator of the potential of young pupils particularly in Mathematics. They could form the basis of information that the teacher is able to use in order to make judgements on the need of the pupils.

In a country which suffers from a severe shortage of trained teachers to have a training programme for potential teachers which was clearly focused on the early learning foundation needed by pupils in order to give them the best opportunity of progressing and developing would be advantageous.

References:

Gay et al 1995

Howie S (2002) English Language proficiency and contextual factors influencing mathematics achievement of secondary pupils in South Africa. PhD thesis, university of Twente

Williams T. (1998) Pupil retention in schools in Lesotho NTTC, Lesotho