Abstract:
An increasing number of students drop out of university
in South Africa and throughout the world. The South African Council
for Higher Education has introduced strategies to deal with high
dropout rates, which include the improvement of teaching and learning
through the Quality Enhancement Program. I hereby document and
evaluate my teaching and learning methods. The data collection for
this research involved student informal evaluation, formal evaluation
and peer evaluation. The formative evaluation data was grouped in 14
themes with numbers in brackets representing the number of counts of
student expression of [their free form]: good lecturer (51); stop
pointing (12); request for softcopy of lecture notes (7); speak with a
loud voice (5); time to write notes (4); field work/practicals (2);; do not
understand lecture notes (2); lecturer coming late (2); lots of lectures
notes and case studies are long (2); update notes (1); no double class
on Friday (1); timetables are clashing (1); require a small tests (1);
revision of lecture (1). The concerns for summative evaluation were: I
was a good lecturer; issues on hard copies of lecture notes and
feedback on assignments. With regard to peer evaluation, a fellow
academic attended one of my lectures to make observations and review
the teaching and learning procedures. I was able to observe that I
ended my lectures too abruptly. As a result, the suggested approach
was that gradually end the lectures with a series of questions that
invoke a critical response from students and ask any student to
summarize the lecture in three sentences. I have since implemented the
student concerns.
