At Stellenbosch University all first-year students complete an assessment task during the first six weeks of the academic year. Results are made available online to students and staff almost immediately and in response various student support interventions and enhanced learning opportunities are made available to students who are identified as…

Research papers take a long time to write and in an academic environment where the "publish or perish" clause applies, writing retreats are a way of creating time and space to write academic articles in a concentrated period of time. This article examines ways in which academics can write more articles for publication. In particular it…

This work investigates the promise of Facebook and blogs for enhancing students' levels of engagement in learning. This issue warrants investigation because there is little published empirical work on the subject. The researchers applied a learning ecology perspective to study the potential of Facebook and blogs in enhancing student levels of…

The purpose of this study is to determine the attitude of in-service science teachers towards information communication technology (ICT) in education. The study explores the relationship between in-service teachers and four independent variables: their attitudes toward computers; their cultural perception of computers; their perceived computer…

Discipline in schools has become a serious issue in South Africa; as in other countries. Several attempts have been made to improve learner discipline as a foundation of the current education system. These included the formulation of the South African Schools Act which provides a framework within which discipline, values and human rights are…

This study reports on the initial experiences of first entering students at the University of Limpopo registered for 2010 Bachelor of Education (B.Ed.). I argue the initial experiences of first entering students at universities have implications for how they cope with studies and could lead to some dropping out. I place my argument within the…

How we conceive what a curriculum is or not determines how we theorise, practice and define it. There are two conceptions of a curriculum: the narrow view and the broad view. This article sets out to demonstrate how these two views are developed. This demonstration is drawn from the recent reviews by the Higher Education Quality Committee (HEQC)…

The mandate of the new South African curriculum for educators to enact a science-indigenous knowledge curriculum in their classrooms is not only challenging to their cosmological beliefs, it is equally challenging to their instructional practices. This is because science educators (teachers) in South Africa have been schooled largely in western…

The research reported here investigates the efficacy of a module in an Advanced Certificate in Education course in promoting conceptual understanding in Astronomy. The research attempted to find out how teachers' understanding of astronomy concepts and processes change after completing this module as well as the reasons for such changes, if any.…

Throughput and retention are important issues in higher education in South Africa mainly due to the stronger emphasis on accountability from funding agencies like the Department of Education. This study, which is set in a distance education institution, was aimed at understanding why students cancel courses early on in the academic year. A…

This article reports the findings of an inductive study on the learning behaviours and language difficulties of a small group of English additional-language students entering a school of chemical and metallurgical engineering in South Africa. Students were interviewed in their home language. While they appeared to have had a reasonable grounding…

Although much has been written on the need to integrate HIV into tertiary education programmes, very little research has been done in terms of how it should be done. This article will report on the first phase of a larger action research project designed to research, develop and evaluate best practices for the transformation of the curricula of…

To enhance research into revitalising supervisory practices, the aim of this study is to identify approaches of supervisors to mentoring and facilitating doctoral students' progress. Scenarios were created to describe typical situations that supervisors face, namely non-responsive students, dealing with students with low English language…

Without conscious will and engagement in critical reflexivity as a process of growth and learning in research, students remain unaware of their subjective biases and the effect of bias on the inquiry. A qualitative, exploratory, single descriptive case study was used to explore and describe the operationalisation of debriefing interviews and…

Supervision has been identified as an important factor in the success of postgraduate students, even as the most significant variable and a large number of studies have been conducted to identify factors that contribute to supervision success. However the dependent variable in these studies--supervision success--has been an elusive one to define.…