Browsing by Author "Smith, Leonard C"
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- ItemOpen AccessAn analysis of the impact of pedagogic interventions in first-year academic development and mainstream courses in microeconomics(Wiley, 2009) Smith, Leonard CThis paper analyses the impact of pedagogic interventions in first-year academic development and mainstream courses in microeconomics on students' performance in the final examination. The data for six cohorts, covering the years 1999 and 2001-2005, are pooled, and the Heckman two-part procedure is used to account for those students who started the course but did not write the final examination. The results suggest that the pedagogic interventions have a positive impact on the performance of academic development students relative to the mainstream cohort and on the performance of mainstream students.
- ItemOpen AccessMeasuring the impact of academic development courses in first-and second-year chemistry(South African Chemical Institute, 2013) Smith, Leonard CThis paper uses multivariate analysis to estimate the impact of educational interventions in the first-year academic development chemistry courses on students' final course marks. The cohorts for seven years are pooled, which generates a more robust set of results than was previously the case. To counter the sample-selection problem that arises as academic development students are placed onto the academic development programme, a selection of control variables is included in the estimations. The results suggest that the educational interventions in the first year had a positive impact on academic development students' performance, relative to mainstream students, in both the first- and second-year courses. The implications of the results for education policy and research are considered.
- ItemOpen AccessMeasuring the impact of educational interventions on the academic performance of academic development students in second-year microeconomics(Wiley, 2012) Smith, Leonard C; Ranchhod, VimalThis paper analyses the impact of educational interventions made in the first- and second-year microeconomics courses on academic development students' final mark in the second-year course. It also addresses issues of methodology, specification, and statistical analysis with respect to other studies in the field. The results suggest that the educational interventions in the first year had a positive impact on the academic performance of the academic development cohort, relative to the mainstream cohort for the first period (2000-2002). The results also suggest that the educational interventions introduced in the second period (2003-2005), in the form of voluntary workshops, improved the academic performance of the academic development and mainstream cohorts.
- ItemOpen AccessMeasuring the success of an academic development programme: a statistical analysis(Unisa Press, 2009) Smith, Leonard CThis article uses statistical analysis to estimate the impact of first-year academic development courses in microeconomics, statistics, accountancy, and information systems, offered by the University of Cape Town's Commerce Academic Development Programme, on students' graduation performance relative to that achieved by mainstream students. The data for four cohorts, covering the years 1999–2002 is pooled. The results suggest that membership of the academic development programme enables students to out-perform their peers on the mainstream controlling for a number of independent variables, and that the positive effect of the first-year courses on graduation performance is particularly pronounced for African students. The implications of these findings for higher education in South Africa are considered.