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An Assessment of the Relevance of the Mincerian Equation: The Case of Mauritius
By Ramessur, Taruna Shalini
This paper assesses the relevance of the Mincerian Equation in Mauritius. Using CMPHS data, the basic equation is augmented to cater for wage responsiveness to changes across different schooling levels. However, the use of the standard linear regression method does not take into consideration the endogeneity of the variable years of schooling and sample selection bias. The IV2SLS Method is adopted, using region as an instrument. The Heckit model is further adopted to address the problem of sample selection bias. This study also employs pseudo panel models as an alternative to IV2SLS as a weak instrument may significantly impact results. © 2024 The Author(s)
Investigating pro-environmental behaviour among students: towards an integrated framework based on the transtheoretical model of behaviour change
By Praveen Saulick
Environmental degradation has become a major concern around the world. Fostering pro-environmental behaviour is considered among key solutions to reduce impacts towards conservation and rehabilitation of the environment. Various stakeholders have been developing strategies to promote pro-environmental behaviour, especially from an early age that is at student level but environmental issues still prevail on the local and global agenda. Therefore, this makes it questionable about the readiness of learners to change their behaviours towards implementing pro-environmental practices. Literature shows that limited work has been undertaken to assess readiness to change towards pro-environmental behaviour. Taking cognizance of this gap, this paper investigates and analyses the readiness of students towards pro-environmental behaviour by using the Transtheoretical Model of Behaviour Change. A survey was conducted in secondary and higher education institutions in Mauritius. Results showed that demographic factors including gender, level of education and age group had an influence on pro-environmental behaviour. In addition, even though the larger group of participants showed positive attitudes towards protecting the environment, only a smaller percentage had actively changed their behaviours towards a pro-environmental one. As a solution, an integrated framework was proposed in this study to foster pro-environmental behaviour among students. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2023.
Adoption of Augmented Reality in Distance Education: A Scoping Review
By Tomal Kumar Chadeea
Augmented Reality (AR) has garnered significant attention in the field of education over the last two decades, with data indicating that it improves the effectiveness of teaching and learning in a variety of academic environments. There is, however, the absence of a framework that can guide the institution-wide adoption of AR in distance education. Distance Education (DE) has always been linked to advances in (educational) technology in terms of facilitating the transactional distance between providing institutions and learners, supporting them both synchronously and asynchronously, and providing educators with tools to improve pedagogy and resource utilisation. However, it is unclear why AR has yet to be institutionalised in distance and distributed learning environments. A scoping review was done to identify the enabling conditions for implementing AR in DE, and the results were deductively analysed. While the scoping review results did not reveal any frameworks or models that could guide the implementation of AR, it pointed out several factors to consider when adopting AR in a distance learning environment. © 2024, Commonwealth of Learning. All rights reserved.
Does Educational Expansion Reduce Income Inequality? An Application of the Mincerian Equation in Mauritius
By Neha Jugessur
Educational expansion has been highly justified by policymakers and international institutions as an extremely effective tool for lessening income inequality. However, both theoretical and empirical studies suggest that the relationship between education and income inequality is not always clear. This article examines the link between education expansion and income inequality over a period of twenty years by applying the Mincer equation to the Mauritian data. Data from the Continuous Multipurpose Household Survey is regressed through the application of ordinary least squares methods. The results reveal that the returns to education have remained fairly constant over the period under study and have revolved around 12 percent. A concave pattern of returns to education, supporting diminishing returns to education, could be observed from 1999 to 2016, with the highest returns to education coming from primary schooling. Yet, beyond 2016, the concave relationship was no longer visible, and the higher returns were associated with tertiary education compared to primary and upper secondary education, a result that can be attributed to skill mismatch, technological expansion, and further structural changes. The findings also reveal that technological advancement in Mauritius has been both skill-biased and routine-biased. © 2024 Common Ground Research Networks. All rights reserved.
In-service physics teachers' content knowledge: a critical reflection on the case of the upthrust concept
By Yashwantrao Ramma
Physics educators must possess a strong foundation in content knowledge to effectively promote scientific inquiry-based learning in line with the national curriculum goals. However, factual, conceptual, and procedural knowledge gaps can impede meaningful teaching and learning of Physics. This study explores the use of the Predict-Observe-Explain (POE) model to assess in-service Physics educators' understanding of Upthrust. The research involved 23 participants from a professional development programme in Mauritius. Data were collected through task-based worksheets and focus group discussions and validated using Rasch modelling. The findings indicate that while educators are somewhat familiar with Upthrust, their knowledge must be improved for making accurate predictions and providing detailed scientific explanations, particularly when disparities between predicted and observed outcomes occur. Additionally, educators' reliance on formula-driven methods, influenced by their limited exposure to experimental practices, underscores the need for change. This study underscores the importance of fostering conceptual understanding over memorisation in Physics education. By challenging and broadening the beliefs of prospective Physics educators and promoting inquiry-based teaching, these efforts can significantly enhance Physics education, student engagement, and achievement in secondary schools in Mauritius.
Maintaining ancestral languages through extension schools: the case of telugu in Mauritius
By Nita Rughoonundun-Chellapermal
This paper analyses the role of extension schools in maintaining ancestral languages, specifically Telugu, a minority language in multilingual Mauritius. Extension schools are voluntarily run outside school hours and complement mainstream education. However, in the Mauritian context, these schools focus on Indian languages, which were introduced to Mauritius by indentured labourers in the 1800s who now comprise the majority of the population. The extension schools aim to preserve ancestral languages and cultures and to avoid language and culture loss, as Indian languages were, until recently, not taught in schools. This study aims to define extension schools and their operations and analyse how teaching and learning in extension schools have functioned in language and culture maintenance in multilingual Mauritius. Using a qualitative approach, data were generated through semi-structured interviews with three teachers of Telugu who have been both students and teachers in extension schools and from document analysis of available records. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Factors Influencing the Academic Achievement of Secondary School Students: A Structural Equation Model
By Shakeel Mohammad Cassam Atchia
One of the major reasons expounding the persisting decline in students' academic achievement and high drop-out rate at the secondary education level in Mauritius, despite the implementation of several educational reforms including the current 'Nine Years Continuous Basic Education' (NYCBE), is that reforms are often developed using a top-down approach with limited grounding into the voices of stakeholders. It is in this perspective that this study, underpinned by the 'general system' theory, uses a two-phases 'sequential exploratory mixed methodology' to capture the voices of different stakeholders to develop a Structural Equation Model (SEM) that showcases the correlations between key contextualised factors and students' academic achievements. The first phase, with a qualitative approach, identified the contextualised factors affecting students' academic achievement in Mauritius, by analysing data derived from 'Focus Group Discussions involving 16 participants, representatives of different educational stakeholders. The second phase, with a quantitative approach, developed a SEM using data collected from 600 students, captured through a survey questionnaire. The generated SEM, with a good fit indices, did not only depict greater impacts of school leadership, followed by student factor, tuition teacher factor, school teacher factor and socio-economic factor respectively on the academic achievements of secondary students, but also showcased the mediated effects between the factors, advocating for a holistic approach to improve school effectiveness in Mauritius. This study provides key information informing policy makers, educational specialists, and school administrative on the way forward towards improved school effectiveness. © 2023 Eskisehir Osmangazi University. All rights reserved.
Narrative encounters of pedagogic partnership, and the development of collegial capital in higher education
By Hyleen Mariaye
Purpose: The study explores the relational encounters of five higher education tutors and programme leaders, working in collaboration across contrasting institutions: one, a modern, civic university in the Global North, and the other, a parastatal institution in the Global South. The purpose of the study is to deepen the understanding of evolving collegiality within a transnational partnership, stimulated by the COVID-19 pandemic related shift to online teaching and learning. Design/methodology/approach: The inquiry is informed conceptually by the concept of narrative encounter as a site of learning, with inductive, meta-analysis undertaken across our individual reflective narratives. Findings: The narratives reveal three emergent themes: shared purpose, shared responsibility – through focus, routinised dialogue and concreteness; collective and individual risk-taking – through negotiated decision-making; and trust in self and in peers – through reciprocity, caring, duality and building on stable practices. Research limitations/implications: The data from which this paper is developed and its related central thesis of collegial capital are limited and partial. However, when agility within higher education partnerships is at a premium, this paper is a useful touchstone for further reflection. Originality/value: The paper seeks to further the concept of collegiality and collegial capital, a dialogical affordance which enabled the partnership to build on previous collaborative successes. © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited.
An Analysis of Job Satisfaction Determinants of Educators in Low-Performing Schools in Mauritius: A Comparative Study of Private and State Secondary Schools
By Asvin Goonesh Bahadur
This study analyzed the job satisfaction of educators in both private and public low-performing secondary schools in Mauritius. It also assessed the impact of some determinants on job performance and academic performance, and it provides a comparative study of the job satisfaction determinants from both types of schools. A survey was carried out with 120 educators from six secondary schools in Mauritius. It revealed several direct factors that create job dissatisfaction among educators. The article provides recommendations to tackle the problems that were raised. The study concluded that there is a significant relationship between job performance and job satisfaction. © 2021 Trustees of Boston University.
Educator Perspectives and Intention to Adopt OER in Teaching and Learning in Secondary Schools in Mauritius
By Yousra Banoor Rajabalee
There has been a growing interest in the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) to support educators to adapt, use, re-use, remix and recontextualise content for teaching and learning. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent and intent of adoption of OER practices and tools in secondary schools in Mauritius within a sustainable and innovative teaching and learning model. The main objective was to investigate whether the inclusion of OER in teaching could help maintain quality instruction and sustain a viable economic model for learners. Moreover, this study assessed the readiness and attitudes of secondary educators in their intention to adopt OER. A survey was carried out among 271 secondary school educators to determine the influential factors in the intention to adopt OER in teaching. Factor and regression analysis were carried out to estimate the significance of each independent variable. The findings of this study reported that Productivity, Interactivity, Infrastructure and Constraining Factors were among the factors that had a significant effect on teachers’ adoption of OER in their teaching process. Combined with other findings as reported in the literature, this study also helps to enlighten policymakers about teachers’ intention in adopting OER in secondary schools in Mauritius and how they add value to the teaching and learning processes. The Cabinet of Ministers in Mauritius approved the National policy on OER in December 2022. © 2023, Commonwealth of Learning. All rights reserved.
Learning to teach in higher education: Integrating informal conversations in a formal programme of academic development
By Hyleen Mariaye
This paper reflectively analyses how informal conversational spaces can be pedagogically integrated in a formal structured learning space. We document innovative practice in faculty development by introducing elements of informal conversations, understood as serendipitous, improvised, open-ended, permissive, and including an element of risk into an introductory academic development programme, namely the Post Graduate Diploma in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (PGDLTHE). The outcome is one of enhanced opportunities for reflexivity and interdisciplinary dialogue. © 2023 The Author(s).
Digital Learning Response in the Midst of the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Case of Mauritius
By Verena Tandrayen-Ragoobur
This article investigates learners’ perception of their ability to adapt to online learning and the challenges they encountered as well as the opportunities they found in this new e-learning environment, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. A comprehensive survey was undertaken using an online questionnaire circulated among male and female students across various faculties at five universities and business schools in Mauritius. The results indicate that Covid-19 was a major disruption in higher education studies. Despite the online learning approach, students enrolled in STEM degrees were more impacted compared to those in non-STEM degrees. Around one-third of the students asserted that online learning was a major challenge, more so for those in the lowest-income group who lacked the necessary digital tools to adapt to this new learning environment. A non-conducive home environment further had a negative bearing on students’ concentration and ability to cope with their studies. We noted that postgraduate students adapt to digital learning better compared to undergraduates. There is thus a need to rethink, revamp and redesign the education system to be prepared for future shocks and build resilience through the application of best practices in the digitalisation of the education system. © Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2023.
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