Examination scores obtained by students from the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), and National Business and Technical Examinations Board (NABTEB) may not be directly comparable due to differences in examination administration, item characteristics of the subject in question, and student abilities. For more accurate comparisons, scores…

South Africa's National Senior Certificate examination system was introduced in 2008 as a single national examination system, in order to facilitate fair and standardised assessment and to provide all learners with an equal chance of access to higher education. However, limited research has been done to investigate the discrimination power of the…

Most learner achievement studies tend to focus on identifying individual characteristics, ignoring the learning strategies that promote mathematical resilience. The focus of the study is on the assets embedded in an individual and their interplay with the environment. It is expected that resilience plays a deciding role in learners' foreground…

The present study investigates the effect of three neo-Piagetian constructs, namely Formal Reasoning (FR), Field Dependence/Independence (FDI) and Divergence (DIV), as well as the effect of age and gender, on students' portrayed representations of the atomic structure, considering their degree of coherence. For this purpose students'…

One of the primary goals of teacher education is to aid preservice candidates in formulating a personal philosophy of teaching that is research-based. Teacher candidates should recognize that their philosophy of teaching and learning must be grounded in research-affirmed theory, certain dimensions of which (e.g., motivation) are critical to…

This study describes the characteristics of the test and its items used in the national-standardized school examination by applying classical test theory and focusing on the item difficulty, item discrimination, test reliability, and distractor analysis. We analyzed response data of 191 12th graders from one of public senior high schools in…

Teaching and reading literature are commonly viewed as contributing to the cultivation of empathy. This article presents critical and pedagogical approaches to test this view and suggests a distinction between low-level, simple empathy inspired by the reading and teaching of "The Tortilla Curtain" and a more complex, self-critical…

This critical qualitative study focused on what are the factors that contribute to high learner performance at a public school in South Africa. Purposive sampling was used and the data was produced via interviews with the participants (the principal, ten teachers, five ex learners and two parents) as well as observations of various school…

This research proposes a new statistic for testing latent variable distribution fit for unidimensional item response theory (IRT) models. If the typical assumption of normality is violated, then item parameter estimates will be biased, and dependent quantities such as IRT score estimates will be adversely affected. The proposed statistic compares…

Teaching senior secondary mathematics presents a number of challenges, such as provision of a prescribed curriculum, homework expectations and preparing students for externally imposed high-stakes assessment tasks. In order to address these challenges, an increasing number of senior secondary mathematics teachers are incorporating a flipped…

In the most general sense, mathematical thinking can be defined as using mathematical techniques, concepts, and methods, directly or indirectly, in the problem-solving process. In this study, efforts were made to include the Graph Theory of mathematics, which is found abundantly in physics, chemistry, computer networks, economics, administrative…

This paper describes the results of two research projects, which were focused upon female students' historical understanding of feminism. In both cases the researchers found that the student participants harbored ambivalent or negative attitudes towards feminism and saw little connection between the present and feminist struggles in the past.…

Cognitive Diagnostic Assessment (CDA) is an alternative assessment which can give a clear picture of pupils' learning process and cognitive structures to education stakeholders so that appropriate instructional strategies can be designed to tailored pupils' needs. Coincide with this function, the Ordered Multiple-Choice (OMC) items were…

Although the development of critical thinking and chemical literacy is a major goal of science education, the adequate emphasis has not been given to the measurement of both skills. This study reports the development and validation of an integrated assessment instrument to measure students' critical thinking skill and chemical literacy together in…

Research has shown that a high level of content knowledge (CK) is necessary but not sufficient to develop the special knowledge base of expert teachers known as pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). This study contributes towards research to quantify the relationship between CK and PCK in science. In order to determine the proportion of the…