Wamkelekile, Welkom
Student ‘achievement gap’: Kresge honour for UCT to drive data-led solutions
05 October 2020 | Story Supplied. Photo Je’nine May. Read time 6 min.
The University of Cape Town (UCT) has taken a critical step towards addressing the hurdles that undermine efforts to close the so-called student achievement gap, thanks to three years of the Kresge Foundation support that will fund the output of data with the potential to drive meaningful change.
The University of Cape Town is set to receive US$100 000 annually for the next three years as part of the Kresge Education Program’s Siyaphumelela initiative, which works to address systemic obstacles that impede equitable student success at tertiary level. Siyaphumelela is a national network of higher education institutions that are committed to pioneering systems that ensure that all students enjoy an equal chance of reaching their full potential.
“It is our responsibility to understand and respond to challenges that we may have the power to influence.”
The concept, known as the “achievement gap”, refers to the fact that while all students who arrive at university may indeed enjoy equal access to tertiary education, they are not equally equipped to achieve academic success during their years of study.
Vice-Chancellor Professor Mamokgethi Phakeng stressed that effective analytics is a critical capability for understanding – and changing for the better – unsatisfactory performance patterns related to both race and particular fields of study among UCT students.
“It is our responsibility to understand and respond to challenges that we may have the power to influence,” she said, adding that UCT’s association with Siyaphumelela will provide the institution with the essential assistance necessary “to interrogate these patterns in order to make changes that impact positively at individual student level”.
Evidence-based student success interventions
The Kresge Foundation is a private philanthropic organisation. Learning from international examples of evidence-based student success networks, they launched Siyaphumelela in South Africa in 2014. The network is managed in partnership with the South African Institute for Distance Education (Saide), a non-profit organisation committed to transforming education to increase equitable outcomes for all.
Siyaphumelela works with the national Department of Higher Education and Training, Universities South Africa and participating universities to improve the country’s capacity to drive data-based reforms. The ultimate aim is to boost the achievements of all tertiary students, regardless of their educational history.
UCT, the programme’s new Western Cape regional hub, joins the University of the Western Cape and the University of KwaZulu-Natal as the initiative’s new partner universities. In addition, the Durban University of Technology, Nelson Mandela University, the University of the Free State and the University of the Witwatersrand are also funded for the next three years.
Dr Riashna Sithaldeen, the project leader and the deputy director of the Academic Development Programme in UCT’s Centre for Higher Education Development (CHED), said that the benefits of being part of the network are clear: “The first round of partners have made significant strides in a variety of high-impact practices, including academic advising, the development of early warning systems, and growing institutional data analytics capacity.”
Learning and collaboration
The sharing of experiences and learnings, she stressed, is a major ethos of the network, opening the way to significant opportunities for inter-institutional learning and collaboration.
Pointing to the crux of the challenge, Dr Sithaldeen said that while access to higher education has improved since the end of apartheid, with today’s enrolments being much more diverse and representative, challenges remain in respect of graduation rates.
“In South Africa, this continues to largely be a matter of black or white.”
“Despite the fact that we are decades on from the end of apartheid, high levels of inequality continue to plague our education system. This is often borne out in the racialised achievement gap, where students from more privileged backgrounds are successful at a much higher rate than those from poor or rural schools and communities.
“In South Africa, this continues to largely be a matter of black or white.”
Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Teaching and Learning Associate Professor Lis Lange said that UCT will now develop an institution-wide integrated data analytics system: “This will be specifically designed to produce the kind of meaningful data that will underpin the development of interventions to support student success, while also improving the quality of teaching and learning.”
Sithaldeen said that as the world moves further into the 21st century, universities are growing larger and boutique interventions are a luxury they can no longer afford, especially in light of decreasing government funding.
Systemic approach to student success
“Data-driven approaches to understanding our students, their progress, as well as the systemic obstacles to this progress, mean we can stop tinkering at the edges and rather approach student success more systemically, identifying and removing obstacles wherever possible,” she said.
Siyaphumelela, together with the UCT Data Analytics for Student Success (DASS) project, led by Professor Suellen Shay, will coordinate the development of data analytics strategies for the institution.
Bill Moses, the managing director of the Kresge Foundation’s Education Program, said that Siyaphumelela aims to ensure that all students get an equal opportunity to fulfil their university dreams.
“We achieve this by increasing the cadre of trained South African data analytics professionals equipped to champion student success reforms on their campuses.”
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