What do we know about primary teachers’ mathematical content knowledge in South Africa? An analysis of SACMEQ 2007

Hamsa Venkat () and Nicholas Spaull ()
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Hamsa Venkat: Wits School of Education

No 13/2014, Working Papers from Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Primary school mathematics teachers should, at the most basic level, have mastery of the content knowledge that they are required to teach. In this paper we test empirically whether this is the case by analyzing the South African SACMEQ 2007 mathematics teacher test data which tested 401 grade 6 mathematics teachers from a nationally representative sample of primary schools. Findings indicate that 79% of grade 6 mathematics teachers showed content knowledge levels below the grade 6/7 band, and that the few remaining teachers with higher-level content knowledge are highly inequitably distributed.

Keywords: mathematics teacher knowledge; SACMEQ; South Africa; mathematics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I20 I21 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014, Revised 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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https://www.ekon.sun.ac.za/wpapers/2014/wp132014/wp-13-2014_2.pdf Revised version (version 2), 2014 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: What do we know about primary teachers’ mathematical content knowledge in South Africa? An analysis of SACMEQ 2007 (2015)
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