The educational benefits, which accrue from the enhancement in student engagement, are well documented in the literature. Some of the benefits identified include increased student interest in course content, enhanced academic performance and enhanced student critical thinking skills. This study demonstrates a significant advantage in using social media platforms in student engagement with the course material and lecturers offering the material. Typically, student engagement has been and mainly is achieved as on-campus contact mode or contact at sites of delivery and even online, using platforms created and managed by universities such as Blackboard. In this study, a comparative review of the academic performance of two groups of students enrolled for a similar subject offered at a University of Technology is performed to analyze the effects of using social media as a method to engage students on performance outside the normal communication time. The assumption is that this method of student engagement would enrich the student experience and alter how course content is articulated, presented and absorbed, in essence allowing the student to feel enabled and included in the engagement paradigm. Feedback provided in the engagement with peers and the lecturer leads to clarity and improvement in the quality of the course overall.
The educational benefits which accrue from the use of crossword puzzles are well documented in literature. The following are some of the benefits that have been reported: increased students' interests in course material, improvement in students' marks, and improvement in critical thinking skills of the students. In establishing the advantages of using crossword puzzles in the various phases of teaching and learning, many of the studies found in literature have typically used crossword puzzles in their teaching before using it again as part of their assessment process. In this article, a comparative analysis of the performance of two groups of students registered for a particular subject are performed to observe the effect of using crossword puzzles as a means of assessment. To achieve this objective one group was accessed using crossword puzzles and the other one was assessed using the traditional methods. However, none of the groups were subjected to crossword puzzles during the teaching of the subject. The results indicate that the students who were assessed using crossword puzzles performed significantly better than the other group. It can therefore be inferred that crossword puzzles may be used as an assessment tool without necessarily exposing the students to crossword puzzles.
The increase in students' dropout rate is a huge concern for institutions of higher learning. In this article, classification techniques are applied to determine students "at-risk" of dropping out of their registered qualifications. Being able to identify such students timeously will be beneficial to both the students and the institutions with which they are registered. This study makes use of Random Forest, Support Vector Machines, Decision Trees, Naïve Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbor, and Logistic Regression for classification purposes. The selected algorithms were applied on a dataset of 4419 student records obtained from the institutional database related to Diploma students enrolled in the Faculty of Information, Communication and Technology. The results reveal that the overall accuracy rate of Random Forest (94.14%) was better than the other algorithms in identifying students at risk of dropout.
The assessment of students' knowledge by evaluating individual course learning outcomes (CLOs) will assist in providing students with targeted assistance. This will also assist in providing assistance to struggling students as early as possible in their course learning outcomes. Furthermore, such an assessment offers lecturers an opportunity to offer personalized assistance to students. This paper proposes an Outcomes-based Student Performance Diagnostic and Support (OSPDS) model aimed at achieving the abovementioned goals, amongst other things. The model is aimed at aligning CLOs with the assessment criteria (AC) as well as assessments (AS) for a given topic, determining student's performance based on set CLOs, as well as proposing teaching and learning interventions for struggling students. As a form of evaluating the proposed model, a prototype was developed based on the OSPDS model. The sample test results obtained from the prototype indicate that the OSPDS model does fulfil its set goals.
Development has been seen in the advanced education segment in South Africa. With this development, an expansion in the dropout rate is noticed. This study explores the adequacy of dimensional decrease and concentrates the significant data covered up in the student information for the identification of students in danger of dropout. This study depends on educational data mining techniques and makes forecasts of dropout goal of understudies from courses. In the test, the researchers show promising outcomes with information from the recognition courses of a University of Technology.
The application of crossword puzzles in various fields of education has been noticed since their advent in 1913. Numerous research studies have reported benefits accruing from the application of puzzles including increased students' interests in course work, better students' grades, and improved critical thinking by students. Even though there has been so much research on the use and benefits of puzzles in academia little research has been done to determine what students feel about them. This research paper is a contribution in closing this gap by establishing whether students prefer crossword puzzles to conventional assessment methods and also whether their preferred method of assessment translate to better performance. A group of students, which were registered for a systems analysis module, were surveyed to determine their preferences regarding crossword puzzles. The results show that the majority of students prefer crossword puzzles over conventional assessment methods. Students gave various reasons for choosing crossword puzzles and these included puzzles being `easy'. The findings of this study confirm previous results of similar previous studies. On the other hand, the results of this study also indicate no significant difference in performance between the two student groups, namely, those who prefer crossword puzzles and those who do not.
'%3e%3cpath fill='%23001489' d='M0 0v6h9V0z'/%3e%3cpath fill='%23e03c31' d='M0 0v3h9V0z'/%3e%3cg stroke='%23fff' stroke-width='2'%3e%3cpath id='d' d='m0 0 4.5 3L0 6m4.5-3H9'/%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23b' stroke='%23ffb81c' clip-path='url(%23c)'/%3e%3c/g%3e%3cuse xlink:href='%23d' fill='none' stroke='%23007749' stroke-width='1.2'/%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/svg%3e)