Public perception of "declining standards" in school-leaving examinations often accompanies increases in pass rates in schoolleaving examinations. "Declining standards" to the public means easier examination papers. The present study evaluates a South African attempt to estimate the level of difficulty, as distinct from…

The paper reports a study that used a Bernsteinian analysis in order to investigate the association between higher primary science curriculum and social equity in four contrasting socioeconomic contexts: British Columbia (Canada), Singapore, South Africa and Kenya. The official science curriculum of each jurisdiction was analysed in terms of…

Taxonomies of cognitive demand are frequently used to ensure that assessment tasks include questions ranging from low to high cognitive demand. This paper investigates inter-rater agreement among four evaluators on the cognitive demand of the South African National Senior Certificate Life Sciences examinations after training, practice and…

In South Africa, foundation programmes are a well-established alternative access route to tertiary science study for educationally disadvantaged students. Student access to, and performance in, one such foundation programme has been researched by the authors seeking opportunities to improve student retention. The biology module in particular has…

In this paper we focus on how South African students' ideas about the human body are constituted in their descriptions of three different scenarios involving the pathway of a sandwich, a painkiller and a glass of water through the body. In particular, we have studied the way in which the students transferred ideas between the sandwich and the…

This study investigated the relationship between readability of 73 text-only multiple-choice questions from Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2003 and performance of two groups of South African learners: those with limited English-language proficiency (learners attending African schools) and those with better…