Assessment and Evaluation
Strategic Analysis of Institutional Tutorial Practices to Enhance Academic Success: Challenges and Successes in a South African Higher Education Context
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Subethra Pather
Research on tutorial systems in South Africa and across the globe reveals that effective tutorial planning and implementation at higher education institutions has positively influenced student success, engagement and through-put rates. This study embarked on a SWOT analysis to investigate current tutorial practices at a South African university to gain a better understanding of tutorial programmes and implementation. The study employed quantitative and qualitative approaches for information gathering and analysis of the tutorial system at the university. Informal conversations with the faculty’s’ Deputy Deans teaching and learning provided valuable information on operational issues while an online questionnaire on tutor practices, sent to academic staff, provided in-depth information of the structure, challenges and successes of tutorial practices. The study revealed a constrained relationship between faculties and institutional structures with regard to effective implementation of tutorial processes. The lack of physical space and tutorial funding also created a challenge to implementing effective tutoring. However, in spite of these constraints, tutorial programmes that were successfully implemented did have a positive influence on students’ academic performance. The data collected from this study provided a platform to reinforce the need for formal tutorial structures as a tool to improve student learning, academic success and retention.
Inclusion and Coherence through Narrative Assessment for Learning: A school for ALL
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Athina Danti
Narrative is commonplace in qualitative research, psychology, marketing, and history. The various types of narrative are shaped by the context and purpose of implementation. Regardless of that, a narrative is a story or an account of an event bound by time. More recently, narrative has been associated with assessment for learning. Narrative assessment for learning is argued to be the most appropriate of a sociocultural model viewing learners with special educational needs, in which the individual is viewed within their physical, social, and cultural setting, and where attention is paid to the whole environment in order to improve learning outcomes for students. Narrative assessment for learning has some particular features. First, it recounts learning events within and beyond school settings and it tells the story of learning by capturing the context, the people, and the relationships. It is also bound and defined by the time over which learning is noticed by the narrator, taking into note of the ways that learning strengthens over time. Unlike traditional assessment methods, it contributes towards closing the gaps between learners and teachers, strengthening power with and power for relationships and supports the construction of learner identities as capable, competent, able, included, and valued.
Field Dependence and Cognitive Style in the Academic Performance of Children and Adolescents
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Zélia Anastácio, Theodomiro Gama Júnior, Filomena Ponte
The stylistic standard Field Dependence (FD) has been connected with various aspects of the personality, procedures and strategies used in solving problems or a weighted aggregation of cognitive, affective and motivational aspects, inherent to the information processing and problem solving. The relationship between FD, intelligence and academic performance remains shrouded in controversy. In this study, FD was associated with the written expression of children, one area that reveals great difficulty in information processing. The study included a sample of 92 pupils of 3rd and 4th grade of primary school (45 males; 47 females), aged between 8 and 11 years, and the quality of the writing expression of the students was assessed. Our results show a statistically significant relationship when we associate the results obtained in the test of intelligence and cognitive style with the students' performance on the test of written expression. This is a classic relation but still incompletely understood. In our study, this observation occurred mainly among students of the fourth grade, and may reflect the emergence of cognitive style in this school/age range. However, the observation of a text effect in the Raven test near the students of 4th year of schooling does not allow us to move forward in this case without a better control of the general intelligence of the students. We conclude, convinced, that we can associate the students’ cognitive skills (factor g, cognitive style), with cognitive and metacognitive processes that can generalize to their learning and academic performance.
