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…

Objective: The aim of this study was to measure possible impacts of a salutogenic lifestyle education programme on wellness and academic outcomes in a group of socioeconomically disadvantaged students in the first year of higher education. Setting: University in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. Methods: A mixed-methods approach was…

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.…

This paper explores two foundation phase teachers' example spaces (a space in the mind where examples exist) when teaching number-related topics in relation to snapshots of their content knowledge (CK). Data was collected during a pilot primary maths for teaching course that included assessments of teacher content knowledge (CK). An analysis of a…

In this paper analysis of Grade 3 mathematics teaching in South Africa shows evidence of associations between teaching and learning outcomes in an adapted learning study. The intervention dealt with partitioning and part-part-whole relations, taking a structural approach within tasks and representations. Our analysis of this teaching emphasizes…

This paper reports on a study carried out at a University of Technology, South Africa, aimed at identifying the existence of the mathematical knowledge gap and evaluating the intervention designed to bridge the knowledge gap amongst students studying first year mathematics at the Chemical Engineering Extended Curriculum Program (ECP). In this…

This study focuses on the effects of the exposure of pre-service education students (n=87) to a variety of toys used as educative curriculum material in an attempt to develop their understanding of energy. Changes in their knowledge, their confidence in terms of this knowledge, and the reasons they attributed for any changes in both their…

It is commonly accepted that Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) has a topic-specific nature. However, its implementation in teacher education programmes has remained generic and tacit. This paper reports on an attempt to improve the quality of PCK in chemistry pre-service teachers in a specified topic--chemical equilibrium. By locating PCK at a…

We take an innovative approach to estimating student mathematics learning in the sixth grade of three African countries. The study reinforces the notion that beyond the quality of the teaching process in classrooms, national contextual factors are important in understanding the contribution that schooling makes to student performance. Our approach…

First year Geology students at the University of the Witwatersrand experience problems with both three-dimensional and "four-dimensional" (or time) visualization when attempting to interpret geological maps. These difficulties have been addressed by the introduction of hands-on modeling exercises, which allow students to construct…

A pre-test post-test correlated groups design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the Shuttleworth/Rotary Number Skills Development Programme to enhance the numeracy of Grade 2 learners (N = 169) from five primary schools (a private school, a school of auditory impaired learners, and three rural schools). An unstructured questionnaire was…