No abstract

Background: The study focused on children with hearing disabilities, which was significant as almost 9 million children in sub-Saharan Africa, including Namibia, had hearing disabilities. The problem was the lack of prior research on the effects of assistive technology (AT) in primary education for the Deaf in Namibia, for guiding Namibian special primary schools and educators.Aim: The aim was to investigate the effects of Constructivism-led AT on the teaching and learning of learners who were deaf, in a mathematics class at a rural special primary school.Setting: The study involved Grade three children who were deaf. Grade 3 is where children learn to build and understand foundational and basic mathematical concepts, such as counting, which they require for subsequent mathematics learning and practice.Methods: The study was a mixed-methods study comprising a quantitative experiment and qualitative interviews.Results: The findings suggested that the Constructivism-led AT may have had a positive effect on the children’s multiplication and division achievement, but not on their addition and subtraction achievement. The teachers were positive about the Constructivism-led AT and indicated that it supported collaborating, cooperating, exploring, self-assessing, learning from errors, seeking knowledge independently, self-regulating, self-reflecting, metacognitive thinking and being self-aware.Conclusion: For school management and teachers of children who are deaf, the study offered an intervention for potentially improving teaching and their learners’ mathematics achievement. In addition, the study provided valuable evidence for policymakers about integrating technology for effective learning environments.

No abstract

Within the context of almost nine million children with hearing disabilities in Sub-Saharan Africa, their education is an important topic. The problem was the lack of conclusive research about the effects of digital assistive technologies for educating deaf learners in Sub-Saharan African countries, such as Namibia. The question was could a digital assistive technology improve the mathematics achievement of deaf children? The research objective was to gather scientific evidence by conducting a quantitative experiment with constructivist digital assistive technology and qualitative interviews with the teachers involved. The findings from the experiment suggest that the constructivist digital assistive technology may have had a positive effect on the mathematics achievement of the learners, which was supported by the findings from the interviews. This makes an original contribution to the domain and offers an intervention that was feasible, practical and potentially effective for improving the teaching and learning of mathematics for deaf learners.

It has been reported that WhatsApp, a social media application, had approximately 1.6 billion active users globally as of July 2019, almost one-fifth of the total world's population. Thus, research about WhatsApp's influence in general and especially its influence in education was relevant and significant. While there was much research involving WhatsApp and learning, it was not conclusive about the effects of WhatsApp on student learning. Specifically, research focusing on collaborative learning using WhatsApp was lacking, including research instruments for measuring collaboration on WhatsApp. Consequently, the paper's research problem was the lack of research instruments for measuring collaboration on WhatsApp in relation to academic achievement. To address the research problem, the study followed the important initial and conceptual steps of the instrument development process to develop a research instrument to measure collaboration on WhatsApp in relation to academic achievement. The result of the paper was a developed instrument that provides researchers with a basis to measure the explanatory constructs involved in mobile collaborative learning (MCL) processes on WhatsApp and potentially other social media platforms. Therefore, the paper made an appropriately theoretical contribution, which was grounded in the scientific literature. The study facilitated positivistic research and epistemology for acquiring objective and precise scientific knowledge. Such deductive research promotes theory testing and development and presents educators and students with scientific evidence about learning with MCL applications such as WhatsApp from which both curriculum and learning design can be informed and benefited. In the age of connected mobility this is a necessity.