Background
The initial ANA system was developed on the mainframe to monitor the progress of certain projects put in place to address the issue of poor literacy and numeracy performance of the primary school learners in South Africa.
The system was developed as a standalone system where learners and test marks would be captured directly onto the system. Since then a decision was made to utilise other DBE systems that already carry learner and school data to prime the ANA mainframe system with the master schools list and the learners already captured. The systems involved could be the LURITS, SA-SAMS, CEMIS and any other third party systems. The objectives were to save time and costs in recapturing masses of readily available learner data.
This meant that the LURITS would become the primary system for the gathering of learner’s information and feeding it to the mainframe, and the LURITS number would form the common number (golden thread) that would be used to communicate and track the learner data between these systems.
In addition to learner information, it was realised that the ANA test marks, and eventually the ANA item analysis, could also be fed through these systems.
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Purpose
The primary purpose of the ANA link specification is to do bi-lateral communication between these systems.
It covers the loading and combining of the data for the ANA at national level, this includes learners and learner marks provided to and from the LURITS, CEMIS, SA-SAMS, and/or similar systems.
It provides metadata, field structure and validation that must be adhered to. Failing to comply to this specification will result in data rejection.
The initial loading of data will be the registration of learners, this will be followed by the loading of test marks.
Test marks for the ANA, and eventually the ANA item analysis, shall be incorporated into all the systems. Currently, only ANA marks are provided for, the item analysis scores shall be included during a later phase and as a separate document.
This link specification may prompt technical design changes on SA-SAMS, LURITS, SA-SAMS Warehouse, CEMIS and any other third party systems provide data between these systems.
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