The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically shaped higher education and seen the distinct rise of e-learning as a compulsory element of the modern educational landscape. Accordingly, this study highlights the factors which have influenced how students perceive their academic performance during this emergency changeover to e-learning. The empirical analysis is performed on a sample of 10,092 higher education students from 10 countries across 4 continents during the pandemic’s first wave through an online survey. A structural equation model revealed the quality of e-learning was mainly derived from service quality, the teacher’s active role in the process of online education, and the overall system quality, while the students’ digital competencies and online interactions with their colleagues and teachers were considered to be slightly less important factors. The impact of e-learning quality on the students’ performance was strongly mediated by their satisfaction with e-learning. In general, the model gave quite consistent results across countries, gender, study fields, and levels of study. The findings provide a basis for policy recommendations to support decision-makers incorporate e-learning issues in the current and any new similar circumstances.

This paper reports on a part of a study which was conducted to determine the effect of van Hiele theory based instruction in the teaching of geometry to Grade 10 learners. The sample consisted of 359 participants from five conveniently selected schools from Mthatha District in the Eastern Cape Province in South Africa. There were 195 learners in the experimental group and 164 learners in the control group. The experimental group was given van Hiele theory based geometry instruction and the control group was given traditional method of geometry instruction. A multiple choice geometry test was administered to the participants before and after five weeks of instruction (pre-and posttest design). The results indicated a statistically significant difference in the mean scores in favour of the experimental group. The significant improvement in the performance of the experimental group having more learners at level 2 than at level 0 and level 1 suggest that the van Hiele-based instruction had a positive effect in raising the learners' levels of thinking compared to traditional instruction.

After a long six-year lapse, the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement introduced in 2012 included geometry as part of the South African Grade 12 Mathematics Paper 2. The first cohort of matriculation students wrote Paper 2 in 2014. This article reports on the understanding of geometry terminology with which a group of 154 first-year mathematics education students entered a rural South African university in 2015; 126 volunteered to be part of the study. Responses to a 60-item multiple-choice questionnaire (30 verbally presented and 30 visually presented items) in geometry terminology provided the data for the study. A concept’s verbal description should be associated with its correct visual image. Van Hiele theory provided the lens for the study. An overall percentage mean score of 64% obtained in the test indicated that the majority of the students had a fairly good knowledge of basic geometry terminology. The students obtained a percentage mean score of 68% on visually presented items against that of 59% on verbally presented items implying a lower level thinking as per Van Hiele theory. The findings of this study imply a combination approach using visual and verbal representations to enhance conceptual understanding in geometry. This has to be complemented and supplemented through scaffolding to fill student teachers’ content gap.

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Teachers' content knowledge impacts on what they teach, how they teach and what their students learn. In order to check whether the prospective teachers in a rural South African university know the mathematics content they are expected to teach in the schools, at least at the same depth as their future students expected to attain, the research on the Student-Level Disciplinary Content Knowledge (SLDCK) of a sample of 40 Bachelor of Education (Mathematics) students was conducted. The theoretical framework rests on theories on subject content knowledge of pre-service teachers. The data were generated from the performance of the prospective teachers in two tests on the selected topics in the South African senior secondary school mathematics curriculum and also from document analysis. It was found that the prospective teachers had only limited SLDCK on the topics that they were meant to teach in the schools. An in-depth analysis of the course modules offered at the university also revealed that the prospective teachers' limited SLDCK was due to the curriculum constraints of the university. Effective teaching measures to close the gap in the SLDCK and changes in the teacher training curriculum of the university are recommended to enhance the preparation of prospective teachers of the country.