Ongoing concern about poor learner performance in mathematics has led to wide-ranging research on the subject, globally and in South Africa. Among the remedies identified is the reformation of pre-service teacher (PST) education programmes in a way that supports the acquisition of professional skills for pre-service teachers. Developing PSTs'…

Physiology students grapple with large amounts of subject content and hence memorize facts to pass examinations. In parallel, students display limited critical-thinking and creative skills, integration abilities, and/or a deeper engagement with subject content. This study aimed to assess the feasibility of introducing active learning methods…

This paper lends support to the argument that students require a variety of teaching strategies to help them improve their academic writing. The study described here took place in 2014 in the context of embedding the teaching of academic writing into anthropology modules. The strategies implemented were microthemes, peer feedback, annotated…

With the increase in student enrolments in higher education, which has resulted in changes to student profiles, academic development has become important in terms of students' success. This article is a report on a qualitative study that used in-depth interviews to investigate the perceptions of Engineering students and staff to academic…

At Stellenbosch University, South Africa, basic histology is taught to a combination class of almost 400 first-year medical, physiotherapy, and dietetic students. Many students often find the amount of work in basic histology lectures overwhelming and consequently loose interest. The aim was to determine if a draw-along mapping activity would…

Large first-year class sizes have resulted in many lecturers adopting coping strategies consisting of direct-transmission mode teaching, reduced practical time, and assessment. Recently several strategies have been implemented in an attempt to improve student participation and active learning; however, these changes have to be facilitated and…

Technology facilitated teaching and learning can now influence the way both lecturers and students collaborate. The problem is that many of these interventions are conducted in a non-systematic ad-hoc way. There are concerns that merely adopting a traditional lecturing approach to a technology based environment provides little if any advantage to…

Although use of podcasts and vodcasts are increasingly becoming popular in higher education, their use is usually unidirectional and therefore replicates the transmission mode of traditional face-to-face lectures. In this paper, the authors propose a tool, MOBILect, a mobile lecturing tool that enables users to comment on lecture vodcasts using…

These proceedings contain papers of the 3rd International Baltic Symposium on Science and Technology Education (BalticSTE2019) held in Šiauliai, Lithuania, June 17-19, 2019. This symposium was organized by the Scientific Methodical Center "Scientia Educologica" in cooperation with the Institute of Education, Šiauliai University. The…

First-year students in genetics at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, attend two general biology modules, one in each semester. Teaching involves four formal lectures per week of 45 min each, one 3-h practical, and one lecture period tutorial. These students, graduating from secondary education, are well schooled in rote learning but…

Compares differences in successive pretest/posttest scores for 46 undergraduate volunteers following the application of distinct teaching formats to each of 3 consecutive subsections of a human physiology course. Indicates scores increased favorably for audio-visual lecture and self-study tutorial formats but no significant increase for didactic…