Lecturing versus Teaching in Foundation and First Year Mainstream Chemistry

Rene S. Pearce, Lawrence O. Okwuashi 
(University of Venda, South Africa)

Abstract: At secondary schools, students are spoon fed and often encouraged to regurgitate their work. The transition from secondary schools to tertiary institutions is often frightening, together with the mode of instruction, which is lecturing. When lecturing, the instructor teaches, instructs’, addresses or talks. Lecturing is a way of imparting knowledge to students and it strongly encourages self studies. When teaching, the instructor educates’, tutors, edifies and trains the students. In teaching, the responsibility is more on the lecturer to cover the module in-depth and explicitly; teaching thus focuses more on imparting understanding compared to delivery of concepts. According to Gibbs, the presentation of lectures is important as, “a lecture may inspire a student to read more.” When teaching with the hope of imparting both knowledge and understanding, the lecturer must adopt specific assessment methods. “Appropriate assessment methods, engages students in exactly the kind of learning, you, the lecturer, want to achieve.” The transition from traditional lecturing to teaching allows one to adopt various methods of assessing students; a deep approach to learning is encouraged. According to Luckett “a deep approach to learning encourages active, long term engagement with tasks.” Research on (1) the mode of instruction in Foundation Chemistry and mainstream first year Chemistry was conducted and (2) the students pass and failure rates were compared. The findings revealed that the teaching method used in Foundation Chemistry yielded better results compared to the lecturing method used in the mainstream Chemistry. The research findings recommend that teaching and lecturing methods should be implemented in the mainstream Chemistry to improve the student pass rates.

Key words: lecturing methods, teaching methods, student pass rates