3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Learning styles of urban and rural black South African children(2014-05-28) Meyerowitz, GabrielleThe learning styles of 30 urban and 30 rural black children were rated by their teachers, using the Learning Style Identification Inventory. The results obtained frtiin the teachers of the rural sample were found to be inaccurate. It was therefore not possible to make comparisons with previous findings. The results of the urban sample suggest that, on the Abstract-Concrete dimension their learning styles tended towards the Concrete end of the dimension, and on the Verbal-imaginal dimension, their ratings tended towards the Imaginal end of the dimension. An analysis of variance and Bonferroni / test indicated that these children were rated significantly more Imaginal than Verbal and significantly more Concrete than Abstract These findings are in contrast with previous research in other countries and tentatively suggest that urban children in South Africa are functioning in a manner more consistent with findings regarding learning styles of rural children in other countries. This has implications for teachers and the teaching styles of teachers in urban schools.Item Attributional style and academic achievement in a sample of black primary school children(2014-05-23) Mayer, AlizaThis study examined the role that attributional style played in the academic achievement and school performance of a sample of 150 black primary school learners in grades 5 and 6 in an inner city school in the Johannesburg area. The Children’s Attributional Style Questionnaire (CASQ, 1984) was administered to determine the attributional styles. The questionnaire was comprised of 10 subscales and from this an overall level of optimism or pessimism was obtained. The academic achievement of the learners was measured by obtaining the end of year academic results of 1997 and 1998 from the mark schedules of each teacher. The results did not reveal significant correlations between attributional styles and academic achievement. This was contradictory to the existing literature. It appears that, in this disadvantaged group in South Africa, it is not attributional style that impacts upon academic achievement and school performance. However it appears that learned helplessness in terms of Seligman and Maier’s (1967) original formulation, rather than attributional style as in the reformulated theory of Abramson, Seligman & Teasdale (1978) may impact upon academic achievement in this community.