The chain of progression from teacher education to qualification to classroom instruction and student engagement, and then to learning and achievement, is not as straightforward as often presented. Societal, political and economic pressures create either a positive climate or a stressful one for both teachers and students. Nevertheless it is safe…

South Africa participated in TIMSS from 1995 to 2015. Over these two decades, some positive changes have been reported on the aggregated mathematics performance patterns of South African learners. This paper focuses on the achievement patterns of South Africa's high-performing Grade 9 learners (n = 3378) in comparison with similar subsamples of…

A challenge encountered when monitoring mathematics teaching and learning at high school is that taxonomies such as Bloom's, and variations of this work, are not entirely adequate for providing meaningful feedback to teachers beyond very general cognitive categories that are difficult to interpret. Challenges of this nature are also encountered in…