Group items tagged

he second event aims to finish the current draft of the Gr 10 ML textbook, in collaboration with interested educators and post-grad students. This Grade 10 Maths Lit textbook will be available for use in 2013 and beyond, and have its own website, be available via cellphone, on Mxit, as a PDF and in print. We are in serious negotiations with DBE to have it printed for all government schools next year.

Lesson plan idea: Using this infographic, the students can create a similar breakdown of costing for our South African scenario. And they can do a comparison of what it cost to study here and overseas. 

"Online social network sites like Facebook and Twitter became common destinations for young people. Throughout the world, young people are logging in, creating elaborate profiles, publicly articulating their relationships with other participants, and writing extensive comments back and forth. South Africa was not left behind and Facebook became increasingly popular amongst people of all ages. Figure 1 below gives a summary of the total number of Facebook users in South Africa from March 2011 to July 2011. Study Figure 2.1 and answer the questions that follow:"

The objective of good math teaching should not be to "cover the curriculum" but to show students how to explore our fascinating and beautiful world through the lens of mathematics. We must change our focus in math education from a focus on a largely irrelevant and uninteresting set of learning objectives to a focus on making math relevant and engaging for students.

In order to ascertain the real-life situations that teachers, as stakeholders, would find suitable and appropriate to deal with in Mathematical Literacy (a compulsory subject for students who are not doing Mathematics at the Further Education and Training level of the South African education system), we embarked on a study known as the Relevance of School Mathematics Education (ROSME). The principle underpinning this article is that there are times when it is necessary to assess the functionality and quality of questionnaires used to ascertain affective domain issues. The study provides an analysis technique which is not affected by the sample of individuals completing a questionnaire, provided that the instrument meets particular requirements. It thus improves the rigour of measurement. Various statistics obtained in this study showed that the instrument used to determine the real-life situations which teachers prefer for Mathematical Literacy reasonably identifies this variable. However, it is cautioned that much more care needs to be exercised in construction of such instruments. The results also indicated the real-life situations which teachers most and least preferred to be included in Mathematical Literacy, providing useful information for policy-makers and textbook authors on contextual situations to be included in learning materials.

New article published online in Pythagoras, 32(1): Rasch modelling of Mathematics and Science teachers' preferences of real-life situations to be used in Mathematical Literacy.

All the materials developed by MALATI are in the public domain. They may be freely used and adapted, with acknowledgement to MALATI and the Open Society Foundation for South Africa. The documents provided here are the teacher documents, consisting of the learner activities and accompanying teacher notes. We also include the rationale document for each content area, giving background on the underlying philosophy and design principles.

In this unit students develop a variety of mathematical skills including: * Data collection and organisation, using a questionnaire about grocery stores, brand names and cell-phones.* Graphical representation of the data collected using bar graphs and pie charts.* Understanding cumulative data, as well as developing and interpreting frequency tables. * Analysis of data to answer questions, using graphs and tables.* Reading and interpreting fi gures, in the context of a newspaper report concerning skills development. * Calculating the various measures of central tendency and percentages in the context of workers and wages.* Working with range and spread of data.* Identifying distortion and manipulation of information.* Identifying patterns and trends,  through working with scatterplots and broken line graphs.* Making simple predictions and comparisons.