Curriculum statements are crucial documents for guiding teaching and learning as they describe the content and skills to be acquired by learners. Textbooks translate curriculum statements into materials for use in schools. This study examines the educative nature of three physical sciences textbooks about electrostatics using the lens of…

Developing students' understanding of and about science is an important educational goal. Learning the nature of science (NOS) has been recognized as a critical component of science literacy, affecting how students (our future citizens) make informed decisions. Textbooks can be useful teaching materials if the content presented aligns with…

Like all school textbooks, geography textbooks are authored. Almost all textbook research in and beyond geography has neglected their authors. This questionnaire-based multinational research project investigated the perceptions of 71 primary and secondary school geography textbook authors from seven countries in five continents. Though not…

This paper reports on transforming Foundation Phase teachers' use of learning and teaching support materials (LTSMs) to sustain teaching and learning in Life Skills classrooms. This paper aimed to comprehend teachers' perspectives on how they could transform their practices using LTSMs to improve their teaching and learner performance to…

This case study carried out during the 2020 coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown used online data collection means to investigate the distribution of cognitive demand levels of probability and counting principles (PCP) learning tasks in a popular online Grade 12 mathematics textbook, based on the PCP teachers' rating. The teachers'…

Background: Research suggests that the South African school curriculum, including subjects such as Life Sciences, may be failing to address students' socio-scientific challenges such as HIV/AIDS. This could be due to the curriculum ideology that foregrounds content presented in the school subjects and related instructional designs. Given the…

This article reports on the effect of textbook analysis as a tool of teacher professional development on nature of science (NOS) understanding of 10 science teachers in South Africa. The teacher professional development program (TPDP) was based on an explicit reflective methodology of textbook analysis and conducted online due to the Covid-induced…

The Gauteng Department of Education (GDE) is responsible for managing and administering public and registered private educational institutions within this South African province. The GDE has introduced a Paperless Classroom project where prioritised schools are provided with smartboards, laptops and tablets to teachers and learners in targeted…

Textbooks remain an important resource in the hands of science teachers in ensuring that curricular aims and educational reforms are realised in school science. In a publication of the National Research Council (NRC) entitled "A Framework for K-12 Science Education," emphasis is placed on students experiencing inquiry-based practices and…

Researchers have generally agreed that textbooks as a major conveyor of the curriculum play a dominant role in modern education scenes across different school subjects. The study analyzed a set of four learners' textbooks and their corresponding teachers' guides which are used as set books for teaching mathematics at Grade 9 level in South Africa.…

Reading challenges occasioned by the third to fourth grade transition in South Africa's primary schools are well-documented, particularly in content area texts. Grade 4 reading heralds a shift from narrative text to content text reading, the latter credited with greater reading demands than the former. There is, however, dearth of research on how…

The Soweto Uprising comprised a series of protests led by secondary school students in South Africa that began on 16 June 1976. Historians and political analysts concur that the Soweto Uprising was a watershed in the national liberation struggle and ushered in the demise of the apartheid system. This article examines the presentation of the Soweto…

Herein the argument advanced is that excellent shepherd leadership practices serve as a condition necessary for affording South African university students easy access to the required book chapters instead of enduring the burden of having to buy the full books. In order to embellish this viewpoint, relevant data were collected through focus group…

Purpose: Communication, which is the cornerstone of knowledge creation and transmission, is sometimes undermined by noise often described simply as errors but hardly interrogated as communication noise. Therefore, this paper aims to explain noise from the perspective of communication (content creation, decoding and transmission) with a view to…

The aim with this study was to analyse and explore how physical sciences, engineering science and technology subjects (technical electrical technology, technical civil technology, technical mechanical technology) can contribute to the alignment of the technical sciences curriculum. We used document analysis to collect data. An analysis of the…