This study examines measurement invariance of student perceptions of teaching quality collected in five countries: Indonesia (n students = 6,331), the Netherlands (n students = 6,738), South Africa (n students = 3,422), South Korea (n students = 6,997) and Spain (n students = 4,676). The administered questionnaire was the My Teacher Questionnaire…

Three different groups in a class of first-year tertiary engineering students had to solve a problem based on a project by applying the distinctive problem-based learning (PBL) approach. Each group's project (PBL project) was then studied by the other two groups after successful completion and demonstration. Each group then had to study the…

Learner-to-teacher bullying is a focus area that has not been widely researched. The current research, underpinned by the ecosystemic paradigm, examined the proportion of teachers who reported exposure to bullying by learners. The study was carried out by using the Learner-to-teacher Bullying Questionnaire developed for this research.…

Introduction: The Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students (ASSIST Short Version) was used to better understand the students' approaches to learning in a mathematics classes. Method: Quantitave method was used in this study. Participants were 345 first and second year mathematics students from a university in the Gauteng province of…

This study identifies factors predicting reading literacy achievement among Grade 4 students in South Africa by utilizing Vygotsky's social interaction theory. The study draws on the preProgress in International Reading Literacy Study (prePIRLS) 2011 data, which places South African Grade 4 students' results below the international centre point of…

One of the more frequently cited cultural dimensions within the field of cultural research is that of cultural strength (Cameron & Ettington, 1998). Early published works on organisational culture argue that there is an absolute need for a "strong" culture for organisations to be effective. This study has examined the contradiction…

Are South Africans financially literate, and how can this be measured? Until 2009 there was no South African financial literacy measure and, therefore, the aim was to develop a South African measurement instrument that is scientific, socially acceptable, valid and reliable. To achieve this aim a contextual and conceptual analysis of financial…

Program visualization (PV) is one of the approaches to assist novices in introductory programming courses. We investigated the effect of a newly developed PV tool to teach tracing to first-year programming students at a South-African university. The tool takes the form of an interactive computer-based tutorial that teaches students how to draw…

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…

The existing literature on Problem-based learning (PBL) mostly paints a positive picture. If there were more evidence of the limitations of PBL, more could be done to apply the appropriate interventions to optimize the experience of PBL for students. The purpose of this article is to discuss second year medical students' perceptions of the…

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…

Almost annually, South African education is troubled by strike action and the temporary discontinuation of teaching and learning. While teachers claim their constitutionally protected right to participate in strikes, learners' equally constitutionally protected right to education is violated. Not only is a tension between these two rights…

Background: Accumulating studies have demonstrated that the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED), a modern youth anxiety questionnaire with scales explicitly designed to map onto specific DSM-IV-TR anxiety disorders, has good psychometric properties for children and adolescents from various countries. However, no study has…

Learning or performance gains are often measured in improvements of test scores over time. However, learners may also answer questions incorrectly which they appeared to master previously, making claims about overall learning gains problematic. Using data from 1,211 grade 6 learners in the Umgungundlovu district in KwaZulu-Natal, we interrogated…

Research shows that although most studies have explored the relationship between attitude and achievement in science only a few have been undertaken to reveal the nature of the relationship between affective variables and process outcomes in science. This study seeks to examine sex differences in attitude toward science among Northern Sotho…