The South African people have a history of resistance to domination, injustice and inequality. It is therefore surprising that there has been an increase in social inequality, since the start of political democracy in 1994. Recently, the five teachers’ unions refused to administer the Annual National Assessments. This action indicates some resistance to domination. In this article, we will first explore the concept of professional teacher agency in the light of teaching, both as a profession and as a vocation constrained by prior experience and social context. Second, we will draw on the current assessment context to outline its problems and perspectives, and consider within this context the enabling and constraining conditions for teacher agency. Third, we will discuss how assessment as a tool for monitoring teacher performance may impede the conditions for quality education. Finally, we would like to propose that the delivery of a good quality education requires adopting a teacher education model which supports agency, and in which the design of diagnostic assessments is locally responsive.

Teaching statistics meaningfully at school level requires that mathematics teachers conduct classroom discussions in ways that give statistical meaning to mathematical concepts and enable learners to develop integrated statistical thinking. Key to statistical discourse are narratives about variation within and between distributions of measurements and comparison of varying measurements to a central anchoring value. Teachers who understand the concepts and tools of statistics in an isolated and processual way cannot teach in such a connected way. Teachers’ discourses about the mean tend to be particularly processual and lead to limited understanding of the statistical mean as measure of centre in order to compare variation within data sets. In this article I report on findings from an analysis of discussions about the statistical mean by a group of teachers. The findings suggest that discourses for instruction in statistics should explicitly differentiate between the everyday ‘average’ and the statistical mean, and explain the meaning of the arithmetic algorithm for the mean. I propose a narrative that logically explains the mean algorithm in order to establish the mean as an origin in a measurement of variation discourse.

The study reported on here focused on pre-service teachers noticing learner thinking in the context of written work. The results show how pre-service teachers engaged in noticing learner thinking and on which aspects of learner thinking they focused. These results and related discussion broaden our conceptualisation of teacher noticing learner thinking as involving both disciplinary and non-disciplinary-specific aspects and provides related pedagogical implications for those who educate teachers.

In this paper we consider the ways in which the Mathematical Literacy (ML) assessment taxonomy provides spaces for the problem solving and reasoning identified as critical to mathematical literacy competence. We do this through an analysis of the taxonomy structure within which Mathematical Literacy competences are assessed. We argue that shortcomings in this structure in relation to the support and development of reasoning and problem solving feed through into the kinds of questions that are asked within the assessment of Mathematical Literacy. Some of these shortcomings are exemplified through the questions that appeared in the 2008 Mathematical Literacy examinations. We conclude the paper with a brief discussion of the implications of this taxonomy structure the development of the reasoning and problem–solving competences that align with curricular aims. This paper refers to the assessment taxonomy in the Mathematical Literacy Curriculum Statement (Deparment of Education (DOE), 2007).