Background: Motor development of many children in rural areas of South Africa is compromised because of various socio-economic factors, hence, the need to address these developmental needs. Aim: To examine the immediate and sustainable effects of a 9-week movement programme on fundamental movement skills (FMS) of school children. Setting: Seven to…

The Simple View of Reading (SVR) proposes that successful reading comprehension depends on proficient decoding and on linguistic comprehension. Some have found the SVR too simplistic and argue that other skills, such as reading fluency, explain unique variance in reading comprehension. Using longitudinal data from a sample of 103 children, our aim…

Literacy is essential to the development of any nation. Despite foreign aid to support education initiatives in Africa, high rates of illiteracy persist. This synthesis examined the extent to which early literacy intervention research has been conducted in Africa and the effects of these interventions on reading outcomes for students in…

Background: The co-establishment of social and sociomathematical norms in the microculture of South African classrooms and its possible effects on early number learning has largely been unexplored. Social norms are considered to be general classroom norms that are relevant in any teaching and learning space, whilst sociomathematical norms are…

Background: The Progress in International Reading and Literacy 2021 results draw stark attention to an ongoing crisis in primary education in South Africa. Research attempting to understand and address continued underperformance has focused on literacy learning and teaching in schools where the language of learning and teaching (LOLT) is the same…

Higher-order comprehension skills are necessary to understand a text, yet many South African learners have not been taught these skills. The aim of this study is to explicitly teach higher-order reading comprehension strategies to a Grade 2 learner who could not read for meaning. This study is based upon Vygotsky's Social Constructivist theory.…

Research has shown that a profound place value understanding is crucial for success in learning mathematics. At the same time, a substantial number of students struggles with developing a sustainable place value understanding. In this regard, two aspects of the place value system appear especially relevant: First, the knowledge of the decimal…

Word problems form an important part of the early grade mathematics curriculum in South Africa. Studies have shown that the relative difficulty of word problems differ: learners are more likely to solve certain types of word problems than others, with compare type problems being the most difficult. In order to help early grade learners understand…

Background: Phonological awareness (PA) skills and working memory (WM) are universally regarded as crucial precursors to skilled reading. The orthography of the language being read influences the ease with which a child learns to read. Research has been undertaken on reading in languages with an opaque orthography. Research on the role of PA and…

Background: South African primary school learners have participated in several national and international literacy (reading and writing) studies that measure learners' achievement in different grades and at different intervals. Numerous scholars have analysed the results of these assessments. We extended their analyses by investigating the grade…

Although the general development of mathematical abilities in primary school has been the focus of many researchers, the development of place value understanding has rarely been investigated to date. This is possibly due to the lack of conceptual approaches and empirical studies related to this topic. To fill this gap, a theory-driven and…

In this article, Mason's 'discipline of noticing' is used to theorise a reflective process for changing mathematics teaching in a challenging context. The methodological approach was guided by critical reflective processes that produced, firstly, a descriptive 'account-of' an unsuccessful mathematics lesson, followed by layers of analyses drawing…

In this article, preProgress in Reading Literacy Study (prePIRLS) 2011 data is used to compare the performance of different language of instruction groupings (English, Afrikaans and African languages) in primary schools on the more complex, higher-order reading comprehension items tested in a large-scale international test. PrePIRLS 2011…

This case study describes and investigates the instructional practices of Grades 1 to 5 teachers and the levels of geometry thinking of the learners, according to the Van Hiele model, with a view to determining whether there is a match between the instructional practice and the learners' level of thinking. The instructional practices of the…

How might Life Skills be conceptualised in the Foundation Phase of schooling when a tradition of feminist literature has revealed the regulation, denial and the silencing of both gender and sexuality in early childhood? This article presents one Grade 2 teacher's perspective of addressing sexuality education in an impoverished township primary…