Social and Economic Effects on Primary Pupils' Reading Achievement: Findings from Southern and East Africa, EdQual Working Paper no. 23

This study goes beyond the well-established link between pupils‟ socio-economic status (SES) and their achievement in school through investigating what material resources in the home and social influences give primary school students an advantage in learning to read. This is done through investigating the pupil characteristics that correlate with reading achievement in the second wave of data collected by the Southern and East African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality (SACMEQ) in 2000-2. The study focuses on six low income countries (Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia) and four small middle income Southern African states (Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia and Swaziland). The variables investigated are divided into four themes: pupil individual background (e.g. gender, school location, frequency of use of language of instruction outside of school); living conditions (e.g. access to water and electricity, number of meals eaten in a day); educational resources and support for learning in the home (e.g. access to books and interest of adults in education); and social influences (e.g. parental education, peer influence).