Mathematics achievement is core to South Africa's readiness for digital innovation, yet current pass rates in this subject are below the global average. Simply attributing mathematics performance to intelligence does not fully account for the multifaceted reality of achievement in the subject. The current study investigated the value of both…

Recent years have witnessed violence in educational settings becoming an object of public concern and global mobilisation. International initiatives indicate rising levels of awareness regarding the interconnectedness of violence and education. In this context, international educational agendas identify violence in schools as a challenge to the…

Many learners with different learning challenges are accommodated in the same classroom in South Africa, which could result in poor performance in mathematics. By reinforcing or disregarding certain goals, a teacher can influence the way in which learners learn mathematics. This study compared the achievement goal orientation of Grade Nine…

The introduction of the Annual National Assessment (ANA) programme by the South African education department was met with much resistance from unions with some stating that it is not matched well to the curriculum. In this small-scale study, I compare the differences in outcomes between the internal summative assessment and the ANA for Grade 9…

This article explores teachers' knowledge and views on the role of learners' socio-cultural background when teaching Natural Sciences to Grade 9 learners at three South African township schools. Within a socio-cultural framework, the research investigated how teachers accommodate learners' cultural norms and values, religion and beliefs,…

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…

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…

Traditional forms of assessment, mainly by written tests and examinations, cannot be said to be fair in a multicultural, multilingual environment. In South African public schools, home language is strongly associated with socioeconomic context, with both factors related to performance in traditional assessments. Children attending poor public…

This paper looks at those aspects of Indigenous Knowledge (IK) that are socially and culturally relevant in South Africa for teaching meteorological science concepts in a grade 9 geography class room using dialogical argumentation as an instructional model (DAIM). Focusing on the Western Cape Province, and using a quasi-experimental research…

Imaginary audience, personal fable, and over-estimation of responsibilities are typical characteristics of egocentric behaviour during adolescence. The aim of the research was to establish how these egocentric characteristics manifest themselves in a learning context. An empirical investigation was carried out involving 316 learners from Grade 8…

The aim of this study is to describe and to explore the main factors affecting the performance of South African pupils in the mathematics test of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study-Repeat (TIMSS-R). The first objective was to describe the performance of the pupils in the mathematics test, the pupils' proficiency in English, as…