A Study of The Remedial Education In The Universities

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The aim of this research is to clarify the current situation of leaning difficulty of students, and identify underlying factors of this trend. The research team started its work in July 1994 by analyzing "University catalogs" and other documents related to curriculum reforms, which were collected from 378 universities (out of 534 four-year universities.) Based on the documentation research, 20 universities were selected and visited for interviews and for further information collection. During the second year from April to July 1995, in close collaboration with the authority of 16 universities, personal data were obtained from 13,600 students and 950 teaching personnel, and analyzed.Some of the preliminary findings are as follows.(1) Remedial education started earlier in the private universities than in the public universities. Many universities provide "remedial" courses on such subjects as differential and integral calculus, basic physics, and English. A few universities found the nee … More ds to start small group guidance on "how to study in the university., "as well as the training in the public presentation and the report writing in Japanese to cover the shortcomings of students.(2) The research confirmed the strong relation between the effective university leaning and the acquisition of basic knowledge in prerequisite subjects in high schools. However, the difficulty of students can be traced to other factors such as the level of subject matter treated in that course, the method of teaching the subject, as well as the course requirement structure which obligates students to take subjects to which they find very little motivation to learn. The complementary learning of high school subjects is not the only "remedial" method.(3) The typical courses which students pointed out as the difficult course are statistics, economics, physics and mathematics. These are common to all universities and across all faculties and departments. This indicates that the students proceed to the university level learning without preparing sufficiently at the secondary level the aptitude to cover a wide range of intellectual interests, the ability to understand the structured knowledge, and the study habit to endure the difficulty in pursuing the study step by step. Less