Tutorials are an integral part of university teaching and attendance at tutorials is shown to improve marks by up to 20%. Impact studies carried out by our Centre for Teaching and Learning consistently shows that students who attend tutorials do much better than the students who don’t.

This is the reason why many disciplines make tutorial attendance compulsory and the results show in their overall success rates consistently.

The Faculty of Humanities runs two tutorial programmes aimed at different types of modules and students.

Our Flagship First Year Success Programme (FYSP) (formally known as AFS) is designed to help first year students to integrate academic literacy skills with their subject content knowledge. Tutorials in this programme actively support academic reading and writing skills while facilitating the understanding of subject specific content. This programme is partly sponsored by the Foundation Grant that the University receives in order to support students in extended programmes.

This programme has a particular philosophy which forms the spine of all the activities of the programme:

The educational philosophy that guides the teaching-learning in the AFS incorporates the theories of experiential learning (D. Kolb, 1984a), social constructivism and cooperative learning (Vygotsky, 1978a, 2012), and scaffolding (Bruner, 1985a, 1996; Vygotsky, 1978a). The following principles, drawn from these theories, direct the facilitators in their teaching-learning work …

• Experience is the foundation of and stimulus for learning; knowledge is constructed through the transformation of experience in which conscious reflection has an important role to play.
• Knowledge is situated and constructed in social contexts.
• The learner is an active participant in the interpretation of information.
• Constructivism focuses on meaning-making, which requires integration and application of information and the interpretation of experience.
• Knowledgeable others are important for the formation and modification of mental constructs.
• Scaffolding strategies enhance progression through the ZPD. Furthermore, we regard the following learning principles as important for creating an optimal learning environment:
• A learning environment should create a safe space in which students can feel comfortable and confident to move beyond their current levels of knowledge and competence.
• An educational approach should facilitate students' autonomy and natural propensity for learning.
• Active and direct involvement of students in the learning experiences should be encouraged.
• Learning experiences should be authentic and intrinsically valuable.
• Students should be presented with the opportunity to employ reflection, action, feeling, and thinking.” (Naude, 2014, p. 24).

These tutorials are run in the following departments all of which have the largest first year student numbers thus ensuring that most first years receive some exposure to these learning opportunities even if they are only taking one of these modules during their first year(s).

The second tutorial programme are sponsored by the Centre for Teaching and Learning and is known as A_STEP tutorials. A_STEP which stands for Academic Success Tutorial Excellence Programme has been in existence for the past ten years and is run by the Centre for Teaching and Learning. Tutors in the A_STEP programme are trained using the Supplemental Instruction methodology and the programme follows a peer – instruction model.

Current A_STEP tutorials