Value for learning during this time of transformation: the first-year students’ perspective

ABSTRACT

Formal education was used by the apartheid government to prepare black South Africans for manual labour, thus there was little curricular focus on the development of higher-order cognitive skills. With the abolition of apartheid in 1994, the education system was re-valued and re-evaluated to provide wider access to quality education; the focus of education policies moved towards the development of self-regulation and higher-order cognitive skills for all learners. There is now a generation of learners who have experienced their schooling in the transformed education system, and it would be useful to understand, from their perspective, what they value in their development of learning within the higher education space. This study answers the question ‘Post-apartheid, what learning methods and resources do first-years perceive to be valuable to their learning when they enter university?’ Participants included 344 students taking a Biology course provided to medical science students at a South African university in 2018. Two questionnaires were administered towards the end of a six-week lecture period, responses were evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively. The first survey, comprised of Likert-style questions, was conducted to determine the students’ views on the mechanisms which they used to support their learning. The second questionnaire comprised open-ended questions and focused on the students’ perception of their learning experience in the course. The findings show that there was a significant (p < .001) percentage of first-years who thought that rote-learning would suffice for examination preparation at university, and preferred to engage with their peers and the textbook before they engaged with their lecturers when navigating challenging concepts. Schwartz's model of social values is used to show that more needs to be done for the development of higher-order thinking and self-regulation when students enter university, and to mitigate alienation between students and staff.

KEYWORDS:

• Value of education
• transformation
• alienation
• peer collaboration
• self-regulation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Shalini Dukhan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2139-3232

Notes

1 Blacks are considered to be people who are not of Caucasian descent; Caucasians are commonly referred to as ‘whites’ in the South African context. The words ‘previously disadvantaged populations’ are used interchangeably with ‘blacks’.

 

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation (South Africa) – South African Agency for Science and Technology Advancement under grant number TTK160505164047.