The academic success of first-year students' learning in science faculties is by no means assured, especially in an Open Distance Learning setting with its limited number of face-to-face encounters between students and lecturers or tutors. Therefore, such encounters should be highly efficient in view of the considerable amount of knowledge…

The COVID-19 pandemic shifted higher education online, drawing attention to synchronous learning and instruction on digital communication platforms. Learner-centered teaching practices in the tertiary level, such as mathematical discussions, have been shown to benefit student learning. The interactions involved in online synchronous mathematical…

This article delivers an evaluation of a pedagogical intervention implemented within a first-year undergraduate university module. The intervention, termed the student-led tutorial (SLT), is based on the concept of the tutorless tutorial and presents a platform for student learning which was designed to increase active learning prior to their…

Engineering tertiary courses that reflect professional activity mandate the successful application of theorems and concepts in order to solve technical problems. This graduate skill is typically assessed during student problem-solving activities. Furthermore, both collaborative learning and the interactive study method known as self-explanation…

For over four years, students enrolled in remedial writing classes who attended eight writing center tutorials directly linked to their assignments had an average pass rate of 95.6 percent, whereas students who did not attend any writing center tutorials had an average pass rate of 39.4 percent. These correlations are just that--correlations that…

Analysis of mathematical notations must consider both syntactical aspects of symbols and the underpinning mathematical concept(s) conveyed. We argue that the construct of "syntax template" provides a theoretical framework to analyse undergraduate mathematics students' written solutions, where we have identified several types of…

Despite the fact that screencasts have been used in higher education for years, little is known about the effectiveness of using them inside the classroom--as part of a lecture. One of the main benefits of using screencasts in class is that it allows the professor to work with students one-on-one. This novel instructional method was implemented to…

The art of teaching freshmen students is undergoing a rapid paradigm change. Classical forms of teaching are not applicable any more and an unmanageable offer of new multimedia tools and concepts is glutting the market. Moreover, compared to previous courses, the class size triples. In view of these challenges, we implemented a new teaching…

The aim of this study is to evaluate a teaching strategy designed to teach first-year undergraduate life sciences students at a research university how to learn to read authentic research articles. Our approach--based on the work done in the field of genre analysis and argumentation theory--means that we teach students to read research articles by…

Found that classroom instruction was more effective than a tutorial approach to freshman English. (DD)

Describes the tutorial library instruction program at Berea College which is based entirely on tutorial procedures. (Author/RAA)

No significant differences in attrition rates were found between groups of students enrolled in conventional and individualized remedial freshman English courses. (JH)

The first section of this paper notes the tremendous number of approaches to teaching writing, the agreement among experts that writing involves developmental stages specific to each student, and the need for writing programs that challenge individuals at their various levels of development. The paper then describes a newly revised writing course…

Intended as an overview for English department faculty with no direct experience in teaching freshman composition, this report contains a general account of the origin, basic features, and current direction of using tutorial methods in freshman composition classes. The five sections of the report provide the following information: (1) the history…