Background: South African teachers' mathematical knowledge for teaching and number sense are markedly low, evidenced in national and international research. There is a call for supporting teachers in developing their knowledge and confidence in teaching mathematics. Aim: The aim of this article is to share how pre-service teachers (PSTs) used the…

Background: The most effective indigenous games well known to pre-schoolers must be used in schools, given the significance of literacy and numeracy abilities in children's future educational prospects and successes. Aim: The goal of this article was to determine the efficacy of indigenous games in promoting literacy and numeracy skills among…

Background: Research has provided evidence about the negative impact of school bullying on the academic performance of primary school children, but studies on the prevalence of school bullying and numeracy performance of children are very scant. Aim: This study aimed to investigate the prevalence of school bullying and numeracy performance among…

Background: It is important that mathematics teachers have a robust knowledge of the mathematics they teach. They need more than just knowledge of the content because they are expected to facilitate understanding of the content with their learners. This study focused on the knowledge of practising Grade R teachers from Lesotho. Aim: The purpose of…

Background: The Early Learning Outcomes Measure (ELOM) assesses early learning programme outcomes in children aged 50-69 months. ELOM assesses gross motor development (GMD), fine motor coordination and visual motor integration (FMC & VMI), emergent numeracy and mathematics (ENM), cognition and executive functioning (CEF), and emergent literacy…

Background: Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) has a negative impact on everyday activities and academic achievement in children, mainly owing to similar underlying motor and cognitive constructs. Academic achievement of boys and girls seems to be different, with boys being more prone to academic backlogs, especially in language-related…

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 article investigates the participation enablers and learning affordances identified by teachers through participation within an in-service community of practice (CoP) of primary teachers called the Numeracy Inquiry Community of Leader Educators (NICLE) in the Eastern Cape. The article draws on three qualitative sources of data: the annual…

Background: The judicious use of worksheets ought to contribute to the establishment of literacy, with a special significance for multilingual classrooms where neither teachers nor learners are mother tongue speakers of the instructional language. Disparity between the pedagogical intention of the worksheet and learners' interpretation of the…

This study investigated how different profiles of kindergarten readiness in terms of student intellectual ability, academic skills and classroom engagement relate to future academic performance. Participants are French-Canadian children followed in the context of the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development (N = 670). Trained examiners…

Background: The acquired skill set prior to school entry has emerged as an important issue in research and policy internationally. Much evidence exists advocating the importance of early numeracy and literacy skills in later academic achievement and economic outcomes of students. Aim: The goal of this study was to determine the association between…

Early numeracy skills are highly relevant for children's mathematics learning at school, especially in the initial years when much mathematics learning relies on early numeracy competence. The aim of this study was to investigate the level of early numeracy skills in a sample of South African children in the first months of formal schooling. In…

The aim of this article is to exploit an unusual occurrence whereby a large group of South African grade 3 students were tested twice, 1 month apart, on the same test in different languages. Using a simplified difference-in-difference methodology, it becomes possible to identify the causal impact of writing a test in English when English is not a…

Opening up space for authentic inquiry in preschool can influence the extent to which children can make use of their growing mathematical and linguistic understandings to make sense of themselves and the world around them. Authentic inquiry here refers to investigation that arises naturally from the interests and questions of the children as they…

This article describes a comprehensive and novel approach to assessment in early numeracy. Topics include the significance of early numeracy, developing a nomenclature for early numeracy, and describing the context for the development of this approach to assessment. The largely unrealised importance of numerals and numeral sequences in early…