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Assessments, in particular high stakes assessments, impact the nature of teaching and learning. Given this, the goal of citizenship if seen as important needs to feature within high stakes school exit assessments rather than only as part of curriculum and assessment policy rhetoric. South Africa's Mathematical Literacy (ML) curriculum foregrounds critical democratic citizenship. We analyse the ML Grade 12 exit assessments from their start in 2008 to 2020 to understand the emphasis placed on critical citizenship and how this emphasis has shifted over time. The literature base links critical citizenship orientations with reasoning and reflecting questions, so we focused on examination questions in this category. Our findings show shifts away from critical citizenship related agendas towards foregrounding a life preparation orientation for the self-managing person. Linked with this shift, we note a move away from general societal contexts towards more personal/individual contexts and moves from almost entirely national contexts to inclusion of global contexts. We noted movement from more open-phrased questions towards closed 'check figure calculated is valid'-type questions. Assessment memoranda suggest assessors view these questions as reasoning items, eroding the critical citizenship agenda. While increasing numbers of students are taking ML rather than Mathematics, average performance stands at around 40%. This points to limited and diminishing access to mathematical reasoning and reflecting for critical democratic citizenship. The paper highlights ways in which analysis of examinations over time can provide a window into the presence or absence of the citizenship agenda in mathematics education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on patterns of post-apartheid learner migration between schools previously segregated along racial lines. South Africa’s shift away from cultural and linguistic isolationism and the ways this has impacted educational arrangements in this country, most particularly in relation to the language of learning and teaching, affects mathematics teaching and learning in complex ways. We focus on how changes in the demographic make-up of some schools have affected the teaching and learning of mathematics by drawing on two case study vignettes in historically different schools. The vignettes are used to illuminate our discussion and to raise key questions requiring further research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]