Investigation of the South African public TVET colleges’ engineering official mathematics curriculum for entry level artisans.

Abstract

One of the main objectives of any mathematics curriculum is to equip students with the necessary thinking skills for real-world problems. As the world evolves every day of our lives, so do the people living in it. Hence, the same exceptional functioning curriculum used in previous years is highly possible to be dysfunctional in the current days. Therefore, time and again curriculum evaluation is essential for both Basic and Higher education. However, before the actual curriculum evaluation, one should identify or develop suitable evaluation tool/s. In that regard, this study focused on the evaluation of the public Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges’ mathematics curriculum from N1 to N2. Initially, the intention of the current study was to collect data across all KwaZulu-Natal TVET Colleges, which was unsuccessful due to a lack of cooperation from some of the TVET colleges’ gatekeepers. The study was only able to access the eMnambithi TVET College data set, where 47 students participated. Two aspects were evaluated, namely, the participating students’ attainment of the curriculum objectives and the ability of the curriculum to equip students with high order thinking skills (HOTS). The Tyler’s objective model was adopted to evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum to train students for the attainment of the curriculum’s objectives. That was done using the pre- and post-assessments method as stated by the pioneer of that model. The results indicated that the curriculum was most likely to be incapable of equipping the students for the attainment of its own objectives. Further on, this study used the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model to develop a new model called the Susceptible Vaccinated-Healthy-Infected-Recovered (SVHIR) model. The SVHIR model was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum to equip students with HOTS. Also, the results obtained from the SVHIR model indicated that the curriculum was most likely to be incapable of equipping the students with HOTS. It was also found that the students’ ability to attain the curriculum objectives and their HOTS have a strong linear relationship. The latter implied that fully equipping students with HOTS should enable them to better attain the curriculum objectives. The convenience sampling supports the need to conduct a future study that covers all the TVET colleges that did not respond to the researcher’s request for access on time. Further pursuance will give more clarity and findings that may or may not differ that much with the ones of this reported study.