Estimation of promotion, repetition and dropout rates for learners in South African schools

View/ Open
Date
2015Author
Uys, Daniël Wilhelm
Alant, Edward John Thomas
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
A new procedure for estimating promotion, repetition and dropout rates for learners
in South African schools is proposed. The procedure uses three different data sources:
data from the South African General Household survey, data from the Education
Management Information Systems, and data from yearly reports published by the
Department of Basic Education. The data from the General Household survey are
utilised to estimate repetition rates for learners in three different age groups. Keeping
these repetition rates fixed, the data from the other two sources are used to estimate
dropout and promotion rates, which are based on a birth-year-cohort approach
for the different age groups. In particular, this procedure involves minimising the
difference between actual flow-through rates and simulated flow-through rates for
both the birth-year cohorts and age groups. The procedure gives different results
when compared to published literature.