Background: Many South African learners seem unprepared for formal education, and a need for intervention during early childhood has been identified. Aim: The present study explored the effect of infant exposure to an early childhood development programme aimed at the sensory developmental stage of the infant's brain. Setting: Participants were…

Teachers' conceptual subject matter knowledge of stoichiometry is a global concern. Such knowledge is contextually dependent, as is the feasibility of attaining particular outcomes during in-service teacher education workshops. In an attempt to understand what is feasible in various contexts, I explore the relationships between South African…

Educational interventions with the intellectually gifted are increasingly focusing on social-emotional learning and techniques. Spiritual education programs are gaining prominence in working with gifted children. This article reports a study examining the effect of a spiritual education program (SEP) in managing emotions of intellectually gifted…

Background: Literature reveals that guided play promotes the development of visuospatial abilities essential for learning to read, write and do mathematics. However, most of these findings have focused on older children who are already literate, and the tests and the instruments used were designed for children in Western contexts. Aim: As there is…

The poor performance of learners in the 2017 National Senior Certificate accounting paper has raised concern. One way to improve the results in accounting over time is to ensure that the first introduction of accounting as financial literacy in the senior phase is done properly. The training of Grade 8 and/or 9 financial literacy teachers was…

Vocabulary knowledge plays an important role in determining a person's language proficiency level. This study investigates the role vocabulary plays in determining students' performance within research modules at private higher education institutions (HEIs). The discipline-specific vocabulary in this study includes target words, sampled from an…

This study investigates the development of Topic-Specific Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TSPCK) of 14 novice uncertified graduate science teachers during a Professional Development Intervention (PDI) on teaching particulate nature of matter. TSPCK was defined in terms of five knowledge components: learner prior knowledge, curricular saliency,…

Pre-schoolers are in a window period for motor skill development. Visual-motor integration (VMI) is the foundation for academic and sport skills. Therefore, it must develop before formal schooling. This study attempted to improve VMI skills. VMI skills were measured with the "Beery-Buktenica developmental test of visual-motor integration 6th…

Despite calls to address global challenges through community engagement, engineers are not formally prepared to engage with communities. Little research has been done on means to address this "engagement gap" in engineering education. We examine the efficacy of an intensive, two-day Community Engagement Workshop for engineers, designed…

Children with autistic disorder (AD) display atypical eye contact and struggle with the social imitation of eye contact. Impaired social imitation may be indicative of disruptions in motor learning processes. The application of specific motor learning principles, such as external feedback, may suggest which variables will result in positive change…

The Occupational Therapy department at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa is responsible for ensuring students achieve psychomotor skill proficiency, as it is an essential component of health care practice. The aim of this study was to determine whether the introduction of opportunities to afford self-evaluation better prepared…

Purpose: This study evaluated the benefits of a ''survivor to thriver'' strengths-based group intervention program to facilitate posttraumatic growth in women survivors of child sexual abuse. Method: A quasi-experimental, one group, pretest, posttest, time-delay design was employed using qualitative methods to evaluate the benefits of the…

In this article, we report on a study that examined the active and receptive English vocabulary of two different groups of Grade 3 learners in South African township schools. The groups consisted of English Home Language (HL) learners in the Western Cape and Xhosa HL and English First Additional Language (FAL) learners in the Eastern Cape. The…

Background: In this paper, I share a case study of a teacher's work on mathematics tasks in the context of a 'mathematics for teaching' course aiming to develop mathematical content understandings and mathematical practices among primary teachers in one South African province. The course was developed in a national context of concerns about the…

Professional learning communities as a form of teacher development have been in existence internationally for some time now and more recently in South Africa. Although strong claims have been made for their influence on teacher practices, very few research studies have investigated these claims. This paper presents a case study that connects…