The purpose of this study is to examine teachers' perceptions of teacher factors affecting the dwindling Grade 12 learners' performance in Business Studies National Senior Certificate (NSC) examinations at the rural Umbumbulu circuit of Umlazi district, in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The study employed a qualitative research…

In this article I argue that insufficient attention is paid to the explicit teaching of comprehension in South African literacy policies and practices. Like elsewhere, governments reinforce the existing curriculum gap by trying to solve the achievement gap in early literacy. I substantiate my claim through a critical analysis of a report…

Probing university students' understanding of direct-current (DC) resistive circuits is still a field of active physics education research. We report here on a study we conducted of this understanding, where the cohort consisted of students in a large-enrollment first-year physics module. This is a non-calculus based physics module for students in…

For a number of years now, South Africa, like many other countries, has been debating a major paradigm shift in education, a shift from learning and teaching, which focused primarily on content to learning and teaching focused on outcomes. One of the most dramatic trends in education over the past decade has been the shift towards the use of…

The Early Childhood Development Manager in Mpumalanga is faced with the problem of providing evidence-based guidance of the best facilitation approach in the Grade R context. An investigation on the effect of facilitation, i.e. play-based or formal instruction, on Grade R performance scores in English Additional Language (EAL) learning was…

This study investigated the learning difficulties of grade 12 South African students in a national chemistry examination. A quantitative analysis of students' performance in the examination revealed there was a significant difference between student performance in questions where students needed to execute a transformation across levels of…

Why has large-scale standardised testing attracted such a bad press? Why has pedagogic benefit to be derived from test results been downplayed? The paper investigates this question by first surveying the pros and cons of testing in the literature, and goes on to examine educators' responses to standardised, large-scale tests in a sample of low…

These proceedings contain the papers and posters of the 13th International Conference on Mobile Learning 2017, which was organised by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS), in Budapest, Hungary, April 10-12, 2017. The Mobile Learning 2017 Conference seeks to provide a forum for the presentation and…

This article about the discourse of pedagogy as related to child cognition in mathematics addresses the issue of what constitutes the main disciplinary content and the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of foundation-phase teachers. I argue that, unless child cognition itself is the primary disciplinary content of foundation-phase teacher's…

As US classrooms approach a decade of response to No Child Left Behind, many questions and concerns remain around the education of those labeled as English language learners, in mainstream, English as a Second Language, and bilingual education classrooms. A national policy context where standardized tests dominate curriculum and instruction, and…