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In this paper, we report the findings of a study on the impact of school category and parental assistance with homework on the mathematics attitude and achievement of senior secondary school students in Botswana. We adopted a quantile regression (QReg) method to analyse the relationship between attitudes and achievement, and also adopted a chi-square and independent sample t-test analyses. The advantage of the quantile regression (QReg) is that it establishes the relationship at the quantile (percentile) levels and does not require the parametric assumptions usually used in the Ordinary Least Square Regression (OReg). The findings showed that positive attitude significantly influenced the mathematics achievement of students across all the achievement quantiles of the QReg. The QReg also indicated that the school category had an effect across all quantiles except at the 5th percentile. Furthermore, the QReg indicated that at the 95th percentile, parental assistance with homework was very crucial in mathematics achievement. These findings implied that the OLS did not sufficiently capture the extreme tail characteristics of the mathematics achievement-attitude relationship. In particular, we observed that at the uppermost tail of mathematics achievements, parental assistance with homework explained better mathematics achievements than attitude. The authors concluded that the QReg method was an innovation to bridge the methodological gaps in previous similar studies. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2014.v4n6p221

The mathematics student-teacher portfolio is used to document information about mathematics teaching, student-teacher progress through stages of experimentation and achievements during the teacher preparation period. Generally, portfolios have been considered to be reflective tools where student- teachers reflect on why, what and how they teach to meet set objectives. This theoretical paper provides a background on the use of a portfolio in student-teacher teaching practice and its significance in teacher preparation by referring to the mathematics subject. The portfolio assessment procedures are outlined and the portfolio assessment instruments developed and discussed. At the end, the portfolio assessment manual is presented. The author recommends the use of a portfolio in assessing mathematics student-teachers to form a greater part of teaching practice assessment. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n15p267

This paper reports on the findings of the study that assessed the capacity of the School Governing Body (SGB) and School Management team - SMT ( school principal, deputy principal and HODs) to support the teaching and learning of mathematics and science subjects at one school in Mpumalanga Province in South Africa. In this paper, only findings of the mathematical literacy component are reported and findings on the other subjects are reported in other papers. A case study was conducted in one FET school and used a mixed- methods research design whereby qualitative and quantitative data was collected. The learners were from Grades 10 to 12. The data was collected in the year 2012 from the SGB, SMT, school learners, teachers, and general assistants at the school. The findings showed that though the students were enthusiastic to learn mathematical literacy subject, the SGB and School Management comprised of a weak team to support the students in pertinent areas needed to master the subject. It was concluded that lack of communication between the school administration, SGB, teachers, students and parents on issues pertaining to the execution of school policies, activities and security, could have contributed to lack of students’ engagement and assistance to master the subject. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n1p579