This article uses a South African case study to argue that postcolonial, emerging economy societies in transition often contain schools characterised as high risk and high need. Such schools require teachers to adapt to roles other than facilitating learning, such as psychosocial support and care, and which requires additional professional…

The current post-apartheid system of education in South Africa requires students to be critical thinkers. Education institutions utilise a variety of assessment strategies; peer assessment, self-assessment, and group assessment are some of the formative assessments that are crucial in the promotion of students. This article reports on the findings…

This article provides a summative evaluation of the development and implementation of the Open Learning Systems Education Trust's (OLSET's) "English in Action" programme from 1992 to the end of 2009. It describes the programme's development from a uni-modal distance education model focused on enhancing learner involvement and learner…

We investigated the effectiveness of the 360-credit National Professional Diploma (NPDE) as a programme that is aimed at the upgrading of currently serving unqualified and under-qualified educators, with a view to improving the quality of teaching and learning in schools and Further Education and Training colleges. To this end, the National…

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…

Given the emphasis on community engagement in higher education, academic departments need to become more involved in the community. This paper discusses a number of outreach activities undertaken by the chemistry department at Rhodes University, South Africa. The activities range from service learning to community engagement with teachers and…

It is acknowledged that teacher training programmes around HIV in most of sub-Saharan Africa appear not to have been very effective in assisting teachers to respond to the demands placed on them by the pandemic. In response to the need identified by international development agencies, for research into teacher education and HIV in sub-Saharan…

The purpose of this study is to determine the attitude of in-service science teachers towards information communication technology (ICT) in education. The study explores the relationship between in-service teachers and four independent variables: their attitudes toward computers; their cultural perception of computers; their perceived computer…

Universities of Technology (UTs) offer career-focused education in a wide variety of disciplines and fields. Traditionally, UTs recruited academic staff with relevant workplace experience, rather than academic qualifications. The result of this strategy was, while many lecturers possessed professional qualifications in their field, they did not…

To improve black South Africans' educational conditions, the Teacher Opportunity Programmes (TOPS), in conjunction with some University of South Carolina education professors, is providing inservice training to teachers and principals. A USC evaluation team found that learning levels do not have to be deep for change to occur and that race/gender…

Research has shown that affordances of computers may be exploited in the design of mathematical tasks so as to provide interesting and challenging activities. At the same time, opportunities for learning mathematics may be constrained if the design of the task is not appropriate. A tool which allows teachers, researchers and task designers to…

Papers from the proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference of the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society was submitted in two volumes. Volume 1 contains papers submitted at the conference held in Sofia, Bulgaria, June 14-17, 2016. Volume 2 contains papers submitted at the 4th International Partner Conference of the International Research Centre…

I report on what teachers in an Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) inservice programme learned about probabilistic reasoning in relation to teaching it. I worked "on the inside" using my practice as a site for studying teaching and learning. The teachers were from three different towns in the Northern Cape province and had limited…

Evolution was introduced into the senior secondary school Life Sciences curriculum in South Africa for the first time in 2008. Research in other countries shows that evolution is an extremely controversial topic to teach, raising serious concerns for teachers. Curriculum change theory dealing with "stages of concern" suggests that…

A study was undertaken to ascertain the position of inservice training for librarians in South Africa and to determine what adjustments were necessary for inservice training practice in South African libraries. An examination of the literature on inservice training revealed current trends, and the literature in the field of library science was…