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…

This study investigated the developmental influence of collaborative games, in the form of game-based worksheets, on the performance and attitudes of sixth-graders in the mathematics classroom. It is posited that games have the potential to enhance learning through positive emotional experiences. Non-digital game-based learning methodologies are…

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…

Based on a one-year longitudinal experimental study with 3,782 kindergarten school children across 15 countries, this article examines the association between prayer and happiness. Results show that the post-test scores on the faces scale were higher for the participant group who had taken the prayer lessons vis-à-vis the comparison group.…

Background: The absence of Physical Education (PE) from the South African school curriculum before its reintroduction in recent years contributed to health concerns regarding the low physical activity (PA) levels of children and adolescents in South Africa. Purpose: This study evaluated the effects of a once-a-week enhanced quality PE programme on…

Background: Dialogic book-sharing is an interactive form of shared reading. It has been shown in high income countries (HICs) to be of significant benefit to child cognitive development. Evidence for such benefit in low and middle income countries (LMICs) is scarce, although a feasibility study of our own produced encouraging findings.…

A study on the effect of the use of computer simulations (CS) on the acquisition of knowledge and cognitive load was undertaken with 104 Grade 11 learners in four schools in rural South Africa on the physics topic geometrical optics. Owing to the lack of resources a teacher-centred approach was followed in the use of computer simulations. The…

This paper reports on a pilot study that investigated the effect of implementing a context-based problem solving instruction (CBPSI) to enhance the problem solving performance of high school mathematics learners. Primarily, the pilot study aimed: (1) to evaluate the efficiency of data collection instruments; and, (2) to test the efficacy of CBPSI…

South Africa consists of developed and developing contexts. This article reports on a study undertaken to determine the effect of a Perceptual--motor Intervention Programme in learning readiness of Grade R learners from deprived environments. Le Roux's Group Test for School Readiness was used as baseline assessments to establish the school…

This article explores the extent to which an intervention programme helped learners from two contrasting educational settings manage career-related transitions. Forty-two learners from two schools were selected, using convenience and purposive sampling, to take part in an intervention programme. Two comparison groups comprised of 45 learners from…

Resilience, or the process of adjusting well to adversity, draws on personal and social ecological resources (i.e., caregiving and community supports). Previous research--conducted mostly in the Global North--has shown that bibliotherapy offers a way to support children in identifying and utilizing resilience-enabling resources. In so doing,…

It is wellknown that the majority of South African learners achieve extremely poorly in Mathematics. Many claim that one of the causes of this poor attainment is teachers' weak knowledge of mathematics, and propose that improving teachers' mathematical knowledge would improve learner attainment. However, the evidence-base for this proposed…

This article describes how a detailed notebook analysis was used to assess and compare the opportunity to learn of a sample of grade 6 students from 126 classes in South East Botswana and North West Province, South Africa. Students' mathematics notebooks provided the main data source for estimating how much time is spent on the subject during 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…