Background: The poor performance of learners in mathematics has long been a matter of concern in South Africa. The Annual National Assessment (ANA) results reveal that the problem starts in the foundation phase with number concepts. Aim: This research sought to ascertain how foundation phase teachers used mathematical resources to teach number…

Formal education was used by the apartheid government to prepare black South Africans for manual labour, thus there was little curricular focus on the development of higher-order cognitive skills. With the abolition of apartheid in 1994, the education system was re-valued and re-evaluated to provide wider access to quality education; the focus of…

This paper demonstrates how the use of adequate descriptive feedback on assessment enhances the teaching, learning and academic performance of learners of auditing. Literature shows that this mode of feedback is transformative as it relies heavily on the particular, specific and localised learning styles of the individual learner. It also…

For a number of years now, South Africa, like many other countries, has been debating a major paradigm shift in education, a shift from learning and teaching, which focused primarily on content to learning and teaching focused on outcomes. One of the most dramatic trends in education over the past decade has been the shift towards the use of…

In Life Sciences education internationally, including South Africa, the study of animal and organ morphology has traditionally involved dissections since the early nineteenth century. The major purpose of this study was to investigate how the engagement of learners with animal organ dissections may influence the development of problem-solving…

This article reports the findings of an inductive study on the learning behaviours and language difficulties of a small group of English additional-language students entering a school of chemical and metallurgical engineering in South Africa. Students were interviewed in their home language. While they appeared to have had a reasonable grounding…

Nowadays education in the madrassahs (Muslim schools) is constantly being placed under the spotlight, such as being considered as seedbeds for terrorism. This article takes a critical look at some South African madrassahs with the aim to find out what these educational institutions do and whether or not the possibility for radicalisation and…

The purpose of this study is to highlight the importance of reflection by a higher education institution on its engagement with the community. In this article the authors demonstrate how the Faculty of Education at the University of the Free State engaged with school educators in a module concerning teaching and learning styles. A quantitative…

This study focuses on the long-term retention of basic mathematical techniques in a first-year calculus course, involving a sample group of engineering students at the University of Pretoria. The study investigates which and how much of the basic mathematical knowledge and rote skills acquired in the first year of study is retained after a further…

Primary school learners' first encounters with mathematics in a traditional learning environment often create lifelong "math phobia."(Papert 1980) The situation in a country emerging from an oppressive education system designed to educationally disempower the majority of the population is much worse. The typical scenario in a previously…