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Views of teaching: implications for the didactic training of mathematics teachers. School mathematics teaching is an essential learning area in South African schools. Owing to persistent traditional positivist-based views and approaches, it still suffers from a variety of teaching-learning problems. Various national attempts have already been made to develop an effective teaching-learning program for school mathematics. Prominent researchers reveal that the failure of teaching-learning programmes often have to be attributed to the lack of an underlying grounded didactic theory. Therefore this study focused on the development of a grounded teaching-theoretical framework for school mathematics teaching. A further problem regarding school mathematics is that its teaching and learning traditionally are viewed from a narrow school subject disciplinary perspective. Therefore this study departed from a general didactic-theoretical perspective, creating the opportunity to approach and solve problems from a wider angle. A constructivist-based post-positivist view of effective teaching was developed, before entering the field of school mathematics. In this way an integrated ontologicalcontextual view of teaching was developed in terms of six identified ontological essential features, and their contextual coherence, namely: intention, teacher, leamer, interaction, content and context. Contrary to traditional positivist views, no causal relationship between teaching and learning was imposed, and teaching was not qualified in terms of learning products. Instead, teaching was characterised and qualified on ontological grounds, departing from the phenomenon itself. In this way the limitations of positivist process-product views of teaching could be identified, explained and overcome. Alternatively, a dynamic integrated view of teaching as a human act, directed at the facilitation of relevant and meaningful learning, was grounded and developed. Based on this general ontological-contextually based view, a specific ontologicalcontextual view of effective school mathematics teaching was grounded and developed. To this end a variety of prominent contemporary views of and approaches to school mathematics, and its teaching and learning, needed to be analysed in a critical way. According to this analysis school mathematics, and its teaching and learning should be viewed and approached from a constructivist-based dynamic change-and-grow perspective as human acts. In addition, it could have been proved that the perspective concerned can facilitate the treatment and solving of the currently experienced teaching-learning problems. This requires the reconsideration, from a similar perspective, of the current school mathematics curriculum, as well as the preservice didactic training of mathematics teachers. Specific implications of the developed ontological-contextual view of effective school mathematics teaching were identified, and practically tested in the corresponding preservice didactic training situation in the North West Province. Based on this an integrated model for the training concerned was formulated. It was found that the current training largely contributed to the continuation of traditional views of and approaches to school mathematics teaching, and its essential features. From the developed integrated ontological-contextual perspective definitive proposals regarding the transformation of school mathematics teaching and the corresponding didactic training were made and motivated. Further areas for investigation and development, resulting from this study, were identified, as well. This study aimed at investigating, and revealing for further exploration, the specific and broadening interaction between the general teaching and subject didactical fields and research, particularly in the two contexts of effective school mathematics teaching and the corresponding preservice didactical training. A particular attempt was made to accomplish this in a grounded and integrated way, to the benefit of both fields. / Thesis (PhD)--PU for CHE, 1998.

This thesis is a journey of discovery into a personal pedagogical perspective which the author refers to as 'a pedagogy of affirmation'. Starting from the text of a teacher's written journal, the writer begins to question the source of teacher motivation and examines his own beliefs and thoughts about teaching within both his personal experience but also in more global contexts. In conjunction with questions of personal and social identity, the author links characteristics of social dominance with those of dominant personality traits and illustrates the complexity of the individual with the use of mythology and through what is referred to as 'a poetic basis of mind'. By understanding more fully the question of identity, the author looks at the character of education today with particular reference to the influence of the business model. This he contrasts with characteristics such as caring, community, and communication. Through questioning and coming to understand more clearly the characteristics of public education, the writer begins to recognize more fully his own involvement and personal perspectives with regards to the classroom. This he articulates in the final chapter of the thesis. / vi, 195 leaves ; 29 cm.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the way in which Job 38-42 develops and defends a new theodicy through language of creation and of the created order. This thesis will posit that through the course of the divine speeches, divine justice is shown to be an element of divine rule where chaos is limited and confined to specific boundaries, but not entirely eliminated or defeated. Inherent in this justice is compassionate divine care for all parts of creation, including the farthest reaches of the cosmos and uninhabited lands of exile. The social, political and economic conditions of the fifth century B.C.E. are examined as the context for this critique of retributive justice and the singularly juridical understanding of justice that is represented by Job and his friends. The theodicy presented in Job 38-42 defines for Israel a divine justice, which is boundless, and provides a model for human action that upholds empathy and compassion for the outcasts of society.

The original aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of a teaching approach based on the Means of Assisting Performance (MAP) by Tharp and Gallimore (1988) in the teaching of science to Grade 5 (Standard three) level. The basic method was to compare performance of three Grade 5 classes using pretest and post-test. One class (Grade SA) was taught for three weeks using an intervention programme which was based on the MAP teaching approach. A second class (Grade 58), received a teaching approach which was based on a "traditional teaching" technique. 80th classes were taught by the researcher. A 3rd class (Grade Se) was not taught by the researcher and this class was included in order to measure test effect. The information obtained from these tests was supplemented by qualitative observation of the pupils at work, interviews with teachers and pupils at the school. A general science topic (soil) was chosen with a focus on proportional reasoning skills. Because of the difficulties which arose, the study concentrated on investigating the skill level which learners demonstrated when answering questions on proportional relationships in Grade 5 at Khwezi Primary, and looking at strategies that learners at this level of development use in solving proportional problems. The results obtained in this study suggest the following. (i) Learners tested in this study showed a low-level use of the intuitive skills which are needed in laying the necessary foundation for the development of advanced proportional reasoning abilities. (ii) The strategies which were used by the learners tested were those referred to as incomplete, qualitative, and additive strategies as well as guessing. (iii) Strategies used by the learners tested in this study were similar to the strategies used by similar learners tested by other researchers in other parts of the world. The intervention was short, and no substantial gains in the skill of proportional relationships were observed. The teaching methodology based on MAP brought about changes to the learning styles of the learners. Learners were not just recipients of information but were active role players in the learning process. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1998.

In a study of perceptions of teaching and teaching improvement, data was collected from 68 CEGEP and university faculty members. Content analysis revealed that faculty members and faculty developers have different perceptions of the need for and the nature of teaching improvement, and that their improvement activities grow out of their perceptions of the critical variables, their controllability and stability. / Most faculty members reported doing some work on improving their teaching, but they were likely to engage in these activities only when they saw a problem and felt it was solvable; they used improvement services only when those services were seen as relevant and necessary to the solution (which was rare). / It was demonstrated that attribution theory and adult learning theory provide the theoretical bases for interpreting professors' descriptions of (a) the factors which limit their teaching effectiveness, (b) their own past and future improvement efforts and the usefulness of formal improvement strategies.

Teachers sometimes fail to use previously acquired teaching skills. A review of studies which had examined the maintenance of teaching skills found that some training programmes which used skill practice and feedback on performance were successful in achieving maintenance. The present study was designed to test the effect of practice and feedback in diverse settings on the acquisition and maintenance of teaching skills. The following skills were selected for training: 1. Increasing the use of approval and decreasing the use of disapproval. 2. Increasing the use of feedback and decreasing the use of criticism. 3. Using wait-time: (a) after asking a question and before calling on a student to answer, (teacher wait-time) and (b) after a student response has finished (pupil wait-time). Repeated measures were made of nineteen student teachers teaching during a six week student teaching practice prior to the training course and again immediately following it. Ten of them, who also secured teaching positions, were observed when teaching in their own classrooms. During the training course, the subjects practised some skills until the training targets had been achieved five times in each of two settings (the 2 X 5 treatment). They practised the remaining skills until the training targets had been achieved two times in each of two classroom settings (the 2 X 2 treatment). The subjects observed one another practise and the results of these observations were used to provide them with performance feedback. There was a general training effect although there was no treatment effect for the amount of practice. More maintenance was found when the subjects became employed as classroom teachers than was observed immediately after training. More skills were maintained when there was a match between the class level being taught and the class level practised with during training. Feedback was maintained by most subjects while teacher wait-time and low rates of criticism were maintained by the fewest subjects. It was hypothesized that the subjects had previously been subjected to thousands of hours of observational learning of teacher behaviour and that a brief training course may not have had sufficient impact to counter such prior learning. It was also hypothesized that there were unidentified stimuli, context variables and sources of reinforcement controlling the performance of particular skills by individual subjects. It was concluded that future research in this field should seek to identify these sources of stimulus control.

Programming is one of the core skills required by Computer Science undergraduates in tertiary institutions worldwide, whether for study itself, or to be used as a tool to explore other relevant areas. Unfortunately, programming can be incredibly difficult; this is for several reasons, including the youth, depth, and variety of the field, as well as the youth of the technology that frames it. It can be especially problematic for computing neophytes, with some students repeating programming courses not due to academic laziness, but due to an inability to grasp the core concepts. The research outlined by this thesis focuses on our proposed solution to this problem, a constraint-based intelligent tutoring system for teaching the Java programming language, named J-LATTE. J-LATTE (Java Language Acquisition Tile Tutoring Environment) is designed to solve this problem by providing a problem-solving environment for students to work through programming problems. This environment is unique in that it partitions interaction into a concept mode and a coding mode. Concept mode allows the student to form solutions using high-level Java concepts (in the form of tiles), and coding mode allows the student to enter Java code into these tiles to form a complete Java program. The student can, at any time, ask for feedback on a solution or partial solution that they have formed. A pilot study and two full evaluations were carried out to test the effectiveness of the system. The pilot study was run with an assignment given to a postgraduate Computer Science course, and because of the advanced knowledge level of the students, it was not designed to test teaching effectiveness, but instead was useful in determining usability issues and identifying any software errors. The full evaluations of the system were designed to give insight into the teaching effectiveness of J-LATTE, by comparing the results of using the system against a simulated classroom situation. Unfortunately, the participant base was small, for several reasons that are explained in the thesis. However, the results prove interesting otherwise and for the most part are positive towards the effectiveness of J-LATTE. The participants’ knowledge did improve while interacting with the system, and the subjective data collected shows that students like the interaction style and value the feedback obtained.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.

There is no abstract available for this thesis.