The South African Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement for Technology stipulates that Technology should provide learners with the opportunity to solve authentic problems that are embedded in real-life experiences. Solving these authentic technological problems requires learners to use critical thinking skills and teachers are expected to…

Data driven pedagogy has been introduced into Australian schools over the last decade to improve student learning outcomes, but are teacher educators preparing preservice teachers to be data literate? We used a survey to investigate ready-to-graduate preservice teachers' beliefs regarding their knowledge and skills in data literacy. Before…

The purposes of the present study are to elicit pre-service elementary science teachers' scientific and pseudoscientific beliefs about earthquake and to make inferences about their understandings of science. Although the subject of earthquake is not a pseudoscientific area, some pseudoscientific beliefs related to earthquake were used in this…

Science capabilities are a set of ideas for teachers to think with about science education. There are five: gathering and interpreting data, using evidence, critiquing evidence, interpreting representations of science, and engaging with science. This paper explores what student progress in developing capabilities might look like. It draws on…

This report discusses the nature of research in the context of distance education and suggests that qualitative research be included as a research methodology for distance education research. Noting that qualitative research represents a shift toward more perceptual, context-embedded interpretive inquiry, the paper argues that it is well suited to…

A discussion of a particular problem in an individual teacher's second language classroom leads to a definition of "action research", examines the issues to be addressed before undertaking it, and results in suggestions for designing and implementing the study. Action research is defined as a process designed to improve teaching and facilitate…

This teaching guide accompanies the Life Expectancy at Birth poster kit, which presents statistics on life expectancy from 128 countries with populations of more than one million. The statistics relate to economic development and the changes it is bringing about in the world. Sometimes called indicators, the statistics are measures of social and…