A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Sociology, 2017 / Since the debut of democracy, there has been an increase in the number of historically
marginalised Black students in South Africa’s higher education institutions. However, this
has not been accompanied by a corresponding success rate. Higher education’s response to
this success crisis has largely been academic development programs. While extensive
research has been done on academic development programs, more especially quantitative
research in disciplines like maths, natural sciences, and economics, not much qualitative
research has been done on extracurricular academic development programs in the humanities
and the social sciences. In this study, I explore the role of the Reaching for Excellence and
Achievement Program (REAP) in students’ journeys graduation. REAP is an extracurricular
academic development program at the University of the Witwatersrand. The findings show
that students from disadvantaged backgrounds are not a homogeneous group and that this
influences the types of challenges that they encounter at university. They show that REAP
played a significant role in facilitating these students’ progress to graduation. They also
reveal that academic development programs by themselves are not enough to address the
success crisis facing students from disadvantaged backgrounds because the root causes of
some of the challenges they encounter can only be addressed at a structural level. Based on
the lessons learned from the findings of this study, I make recommendations for future
academic development programming.
Keywords: Access, Success, Academic Development, Under-preparedness, Educational
Inequality, Higher Education / GR2018
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/24567 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Ndaba, Mthobisi |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | Online resource (iv, 117 leaves), application/pdf |
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