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This paper focuses on the Southern African Association for Research in Mathematics, Science and Technology Education's (SAARMSTE's) role as a platform supporting research dissemination and connecting researchers in early grades mathematics (EGM) in the Southern African region. A review of the Long Papers in SAARMSTE over the last 20 years supports the finding of the other review papers in this Special Issue: that there has been substantial growth of attention to EGM since 2013. However, two distinctions are marked when looking at conference papers rather than journal papers. Firstly, there is a particularly large expansion of work in the last 5 years, with a broadening base of participation in this work. Second, looking across all the formats of conference presentations indicates SAARMSTE's role in supporting and building EGM as a key focus of research attention, and bringing together regional and international groups with interests in this area. Given that conference proceedings usually offer a broader picture of emerging interests than journal papers, we reflect on the range of foci of attention within EGM in the SAARMSTE Proceedings, and trends within this. These trends also help us to point to areas that are likely to be of key interest in the next decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflective practice is a crucial element of professional growth that is gaining in popularity in teacher education, yet the ability to reflect is a skill that is neither natural nor easy to develop. This paper reports on an investigation that sought to establish if pre-service teachers at a South African university – in the process of learning to reflect on practice through analysing video-recorded lessons – reflected differently when reflecting on their own practice from the way they reflected on the practice of other teachers. Pre-service teachers were introduced to the Six Lens Framework as a tool to aid reflection on mathematics teaching. The authors compared two sets of reflections written by four pre-service teachers (PSTs) who participated in the study. One set was based on a video-recorded lesson of another teacher's practice while the other was based on a video-recording of their own practice. The study found that the PSTs' reflections in both cases were generally at the lowest level of the reflection spectrum. They mostly described classroom events rather than analysing the lessons to provide explanation suggestions, or reflectivity. We found, however, that all four PSTs reflected at substantially greater length on their own lessons than on those of other teachers. Furthermore, three of the four teachers' reflections on their own practice focused on mathematical rather than general aspects and provided more suggestions for improvement than their reflections on the practice of other teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]