Abstract
BackgroundThe massification of higher education is often associated with poor student engagement, poor development of their critical thinking, inadequate feedback and poor student throughput. These factors necessitate the need to devise novel, innovative methods to teach, assess and provide feedback to learners to counter the restrictions imposed due to the large class learning environments. This study was conducted to ascertain the perceptions of 1st year medical students and staff at the Nelson Mandela School of Medicine regarding the value of poster presentations as a strategy to enhance learning, assessment and feedback.MethodsThis was an exploratory observational, descriptive cross-sectional, case study. Data was collected through separate student and staff questionnaires that required participant responses on a five-point Likert scale. The data was extracted into Excel spreadsheets for quantitative analysis.ResultsTwo-hundred- and-thirty (92%) student questionnaires were returned (N = 250). Most students indicated that the design and presentation of the poster had helped them to select important material (92%), understand and describe disadvantage (86%) and to make a difference in the community (92%). The students agreed that the poster assessment was an efficient (81%) and fair method (75%) that provided opportunities for meaningful feedback. Ten staff members responded to the questionnaire. Most staff members (90%) indicated that the poster presentation had allowed students to demonstrate their engagement in a meaningful and appropriate way around issues of disadvantage and HIV and agreed that the poster presentations allowed for immediate and effective feedback.ConclusionStudents’ interactions in the tasks promoted active engagement with others and course material; the development of higher order thinking and skills which added to students’ accounts of transformative learning experiences. They could describe and illustrate the difference that they had made in their chosen community. The poster presentations allowed for quick and efficient marking, immediate feedback and an opportunity to validate the students’ participation.Poster presentations offered an innovative way to encourage deep meaningful engagement and learning amongst peers and facilitators. Poster presentations should be more widely considered as an innovative way of encouraging deeper engagement and learning in a large class setting.
Highlights
The massification of higher education is often associated with poor student engagement, poor development of their critical thinking, inadequate feedback and poor student throughput
At the Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine (NRMSM) of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), the first year enrolment increased from 150 in 1990 to the current 250, while the members of staff who train on the programme have not increased proportionally [6]
All the groups presented a poster detailing their experiences in October 2018. The cohort, their eight faculty supervisors and four assessors attended the poster presentations. This exploratory, observational, descriptive cross -sectional case study explored the perceptions of students and staff on the use of posters to manage the assessment and feedback to 250 first year students on their community project work at UKZN
Summary
The massification of higher education is often associated with poor student engagement, poor development of their critical thinking, inadequate feedback and poor student throughput. The South African National Development Plan has set targets that aim to increase the participation of students at Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) by at least 70% by 2030 This translates into an estimated increased enrolment from 950,000 students in 2010 to approximately 1.62 million by 2030 [1]. The massification of higher education, compounded by an inadequate number of academic staff [4], often results in staff resorting to the use of didactic teaching strategies, when teaching students This instructional method of teaching correlates poorly with the attainment of higher order learning [5, 7], as it usually leads to superficial learning that resembles an accumulation of factual information (Blooms taxonomy level 1) rather than deep engagement, insight, analysis and transformative learning. It is envisaged that transformative learning, as a desirable outcome of tertiary education, will develop students’ ability to discover new ways of being in the world [9], and result in students’ ability to demonstrate appropriate high order outcomes (levels 4, 5 6 of Bloom’s taxonomy) [10]
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