Research in Science Education, 1992, 22, 341 - 347

A COLLEGE OF SCIENCE: BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY

Margaret Rutherford and Aletta Zietsman University of the Witwatersrand

ABSTRACT Many tertiary institutions in South Africa have implemented schemes to help redress the unfair school educational system. This paper describes one such initiative to increase access and success of educationally disadvantaged students in science. The background of the College of Science and the success of its first intake of students is described with an emphasis on the physics component of the physical sciences course. Sixty six percent of the students passed all three courses in their first year with the most educationally disadvantaged showing the greatest gains.

INTRODUCTION The educational system in South Africa, with its patent inequalities, has been well documented (e.g. Hofmeyer & Spence, 1989 ). However one of the concomitants of this system is the expectations of the few black students who actually obtain a matriculation exemption certificate - the one requirement for study at university. Of the over 1 million black pupils enrolling for the first year of primary school, less than 25% stay at school to matriculation and very few of these gain a matriculation exemption certificate. This being the case, those black students who do stay at school and the few who do gain a matriculation exemption certificate are the high flyers in their communities and are looked up to as the leaders of the future. What has concerned the 'white liberal' universities increasingly over the past few years is the very high failure rate of these students if they are admitted to these institutions. One such institution is the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and this paper looks at the latest in a development of initiatives to improve both access and success of such applicants to the university.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE In 1975 Wits introduced a bridging year for educationally disadvantaged students. This was developed after one or two years into a four year reduced load curriculum. (The 'normal' time required for an ordinary BSc is three years although only about 25 % of students graduate in three years). This reduced load curriculum spread the first years of study over two years and academic support was provided by tutors either in the central Academic Support Programme (ASP) or by tutors based in academic departments. The problems inherent in this arrangement were:

students entering their second year of study (third year at university), often could not cope with the increased work load. attendance at academic support tutorials was voluntary and frequently those students most in need were those who did not attend, it was seen as an 'add-on' for people who were 'thick'. (See Bradley & Stanton, 1986)

In the late 1980's Wits, along with many other universities in South Africa, began considering the idea of a College for educationally disadvantaged students and, whilst the idea was accepted in principle, implementation across the university proved very difficult.

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The Faculty of Science however decided that it could implement a College within the faculty more easily since there were certain common requirements for all science courses. These were that almost all students must take a course in mathematics and that they would all need either physics or chemistry at least at first year level. The idea of a fixed curriculum was therefore feasible within this Faculty. After months of Faculty-wide discussion and debate the idea of a College became a reality. Funding for the additional costs (mainly staffing)was obtained and the College admitted its first students in February 1991.

THE COLLEGE OF SCIENCE Fig. 1 shows how the College interfaces with both the 3-yr BSc and with other career paths.

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3

'completion time'

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COLLEGE OF SCIENCE

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SCHOOLS

Fig.1 College / 3-vr Interface

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Students in the College programme are full members of the Faculty of Science and, from the end of their first year may take a variety of different courses including a mixture of second year College courses and first year full university courses. All courses are credit bearing and, at the end of their second year in the College, students will have more credits than 3-yr BSc students at the end of their first year.

Admission to the College of Science Automatic admission to the 3-yr curriculum in the Faculty of Science is based on matriculation examination results only. Admission to the College is open to all applicants who, although not meeting the requirements for automatic admission, have at least a matriculation exemption certificate and 60% pass in Standard grade mathematics.

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The ethnic mix of the College embraces all the different groups within South Africa since there are various sorts of educational disadvantage, t h e most extreme being that experienced by those applicants from the school system reserved for black pupils.

The selection procedure The criteria for an acceptable selection procedure are that it must

be academically acceptable; be acceptable to the communities served by the University; select students with a reasonable chance of graduating in a reasonable time; and give at least an equal chance to educationally disadvantaged applicants.

The skills and abilities considered important for students studying science in a English medium institution are scientific aptitude, spatial ability, English competence and basic science and mathematics knowledge. The battery of selection tests is designed to measure these skills (Rutherford & Watson, 1990).

The College courses In the departments of mathematics, physics and chemistry where four year curriculum courses were previously offered, the College courses are built on the experience gained from these reduced load curricula. In the other departments the courses have been informed by the ASP activities within those departments over the past few years. For the two year courses (mathematics, physical sciences, biological sciences and engineering sciences), many of the College students will write the same examinations as the three year curriculum students at the end of their two years. College students taking the Earth sciences option take the same lecture course as the 3-yr curriculum students and write the same examinations. They do however have extra tutorial and laboratory assistance.

All College courses are designed to incorporate academic support. The skills and processes which should be contextualized include study skills, language skills (e.g., reading, writing, listening), practical skills and transfer skills.

The student/staff ratio for the College is much better than for 3-yr BSc students and small group work is emphasised for many of the sessions. The approach of the various course co-ordinators varies but a short description of some of the features of the physical sciences course will give a flavour of the differences between College and mainstream 3-year curriculum courses.

Physical sciences course In the first year of the course the intention was to integrate as much as possible the physics and chemistry components. For example, the gas laws are usually taught by both departments; in the College they are taught by the chemists with input from the physicists. The traditional lecture, tutorial and practical allocation of time is blurred when appropriate so that the students may move between activities as needed. The intention is to produce autonomous learners from students brought up in a rote learning environment. In the physics component a contract is struck at the beginning of the year between the lecturer and the students which stipulates that the students will prepare for the lecture session and any one of them may be called on during the official 45 minute session. Any student not prepared is expected to leave the class: this has not yet happened!

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The intention is to shift the onus from the lecturer to the students and to make them responsible for their own learning.

CONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT IN PHYSICS One of the main aims of this course was to encourage conceptual development, problem- solving and creative thinking. These are difficult goals to achieve, but there is some evidence to show that at least one aim, i.e. conceptual development, seems attainable, even with large groups of academically under-prepared students.

Approach to Teaching The course was organised within four instructional "environments": lectures, small-group tutorials, laboratories and computer-aided instruction (CAI). New approaches were tried in the lectures and small group tutorials, but not in the other two areas.

Student-centred Lectures This approach has been developed by van Heuvelen (1991) and Schuster (1987). The lectures are based on, and proceed from work done in preparation [gy the students. Students complete worksheets that present small conceptual blocks: each starting with an overview in which students learn to reason qualitatively about physical processes, using sketches and diagrams. The students will often confront preconceptions that may be misconceptions in this preparation. Similar physical processes are then analyzed in a quantitative fashion using multiple representation techniques (van Heuvelen, 1991). The students found this approach attractive - something that conventional wisdom certainly does not predict. The dedication and motivation of the College students, apparent in their responses to the evaluation questionnaires (Donald, 1991), may explain this.

We have, however, no empirical data yet that relates success directly to this approach. It will clearly be difficult to isolate the such empirical effects but what is clear is the satisfaction both the students and lecturer felt in those instances when the approach really came together.

The most important aspect of this approach is the worksheets. These must be carefully developed: picking an interesting looking problem and reworklng that into a worksheet simply did not result in the interaction in situations where the van Heuvelen worksheets were used. The obvious implication is that one needs such carefully researched worksheets to attain meaningful interactions.

Small-~rouo tutorials to encourage conceotual develooment Students met in small-group tutorials twice weekly. This was seen as the crucial component of the course, and conceptual development and problem-solving were addressed in each of the tutorials. In the problem-solving tutorials pair-problem solving was encouraged and it was suggested that tutors refrain from "giving the answer", but try to facilitate students' problem-solving. The HELP series (Ogborn, 1977) was used extensively in the mechanistic aspects in these tutorials (the "how-to" aspects).

The aim with the conceptual development tutorials was to identify difficulties and then deal with such problems via constructive teaching. Students completed short diagnostic tests at the start of a content "block". What represented a "block" was determined by the lecturer, e.g. using ray diagrams to determine image formation by lenses was regarded as one block. The problem areas identified in the tests were then worked into tutorial questions.

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The effects of thorough, research-based problems and worksheets were again important. Table 1 shows the pretest post test scores for one example. 'Target' questions (Fig. 2) for a module dealing with the conceptual understanding of Newton's third law (Brown, 1989) were used.

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TEN-PIN BOWLING

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Fig,2 Target Ouestions

TABLE 1 PERCENTAGE OF CORRECT SCORES FOR SIX

TARGET QUESTIONS (N = 134)

pretest post test change cars 23% 36% 13% boxes 15% 43% 28% chairs 17% 58% 41% steelblocks 8% 73% 65% tin-pin bowlin 2% 3% 1%

In all but one case the post-test scores were considerably higher than the pre-test scores. The anomaly is the ten pin bowling: the only question which considered a dynamic situation. This area was not specifically addressed in the lecture sessions whereas the others were all static situations which were made explicit.

This first year in the College of Science has been instructive for the lecturers in the physics department in at least two ways:

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The need for basic, fundamental research into students' cognition: how they reason (in different content areas), what their naive beliefs are and how these influence their reasoning and their understanding are issues crucial to meaningful learning. Basic research (outlined above) can then be used as the foundation of instructional development (i.e. worksheets and CAI).

The kind of research described above is in its infancy in the "developed" world (Europe, North-Americas). Although basic research, perhaps "curiosity-only" research, it is imminently applicable: in fact one can argue that there is no other way to develop meaningful instruction and promote meaningful learning. It should be clear that this kind of fundamental, basic research into students' intuitive beliefs and reasoning is needed even more in an "underdeveloped" country than in the "developed" world. Students' intuitive knowledge is undoubtedly influenced by culture and environment but not, as conventional wisdom decrees, always to the detriment of scientific thinking. For example, a seminal study by Hewson and Hamlyn (1985) shows that Sotho children have sophisticated, quantum-mechanical beliefs about heat transfer - as opposed to their "first world" peers (whose beliefs are closer to 18th century caloric theories). This research begins to question the conventional ideas that African people's intuitions (and science) are less "scientific" than those of Europeans. And more importantly: the research again reinforces the notion that intuitive beliefs are crucial to the development of understanding.

EVALUATION Do these innovative approaches to teaching and learning in tertiary education work? The traditional measure of success in academia is examination results and overall pass rates. It is not acceptable to claim that the College approaches are successful unless it can be demonstrated that the quantitative results are at least as good as the results obtained from traditional courses. The evaluation of the College therefore has two components: qualitative and quantitative.

On a qualitative level, members of staff taking second year College students report very favourably on their attitudes, enthusiasm and ability compared with the new intake of first year (3-yr) students. On a quantitative evaluation, for the first intake of College students, who must pass all three of their courses to be admitted to the second year, 66% of them passed.

If we then compare the College students with similar students on a 3-yr curriculum, we find that the most dramatic difference in pass rates occurs for the most educationally disadvantaged students (DET): 64% pass rate in the College and a 20% pass rate for students on the 3-yr curriculum. It should be remembered that the College students entered the University with much poorer school leaving marks and also had to pass all three subjects. The 3-yr BSc students only have to pass two courses to be permitted to return to the university. This being" so, the difference in pass rates for these students is remarkable.

CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION After only one year of operation it is not possible to draw any firm conclusions, nor to make generalisations. However what can be said is that the College concept as interpreted by Wits seems to be succeeding in enabling students who in a traditional university environment would stand tittle chance of success, to become true learners and to succeed

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in science courses. The acid test will obviously be how many of these students graduate in the minimum time of four years.

REFERENCES

Arons, A. (1990)..h. guide to introductory, physics teaching. New York: John Wiley and SONS.

Bradley, J.D. & Stanton, M. (1986), Slow stream curricula in chemistry and physics. South African Journal of Science. 82 (10),537-539

Brown, D. (1989). Overcoming misconceptions via analogical reasoning. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco.

Donald, C. (1991). Evaluation of the LASSI inventory. Internal publication, College of Science, University of the Witwatersrand.

Hewson, M. & Hamlyn, D. (1985). Cultural metaphors: Some implications for science teaching. Anthropology_ andEducation Ouarterlv. 16, 31-46.

Hofmeyer, J. & Spence, R. (1989). Bridges to the future, Optima,37 (1), 37-48 Ogborn, J. (ed.) (1977). Small ~oup teaching in under~aduate science. London:

Heinemann Educational Books. Rutherford, M. & Watson, P. (1990), Selection of students for science. South African

Journal of Education, 10 (4), 353-359 Schuster, D. (1987). A problem-centred approach to lecturing. Working paper, University

of Natal, Durban van Heuvelen, A. (1991). Overview, Case Study Physics. American Journal of Physics. 59,

898-906.

AUTHORS DR MARGARET RUTHERFORD Senior Lecturer, Department of Physics, Assistant

Dean (Admissions), Faculty of Science and chairman of the School of Science Education, University of the Witwatersrand, P.O. Wits 2050, Johannesburg, South Africa. S_oecializatigns: physics education, language and communication, in science.

DR ALETTA ZIETSMAN Lecturer, Department of Physics and course coordinator, College of Science physics courses, University of the Witwatersrand. Soecializations: meta-cognition and conceptual development in physics, qualitative research in physics education.