Education

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    Blended Learning Approach to Integrating Research Competency in Undergraduate Teacher Education Programme for Mathematics Students at Maseno University
    (Commonwealth of Learning (COL, 2022-09) Dr. Mildred Atieno Ayere
    Unemployment in Kenya relates closely to the under-skilling of learners, specifically teachers whose research potential has not been well harnessed through the present education system. In any teaching situation, the faculty’s role is to facilitate, guide, and motivate the learning process or train students to be lifelong learners and critical thinkers. Because information in the world is constantly changing, there is a need to learn how to evaluate, integrate, and apply information, not simply memorize accepted facts and theories. For these reasons, this study sought funding for a pilot program of a teacher-driven but university-guided research initiative that could help improve classroom instructional processes and provide feedback to policymakers and trainers to improve the curriculum and classroom outcomes. This project used the quasi-experimental design, with 3rd-year Mathematics students of Maseno University in the experimental cohort (Taken through an online facilitated research course and supervised in a blended mode at Maseno and face-to-face in Kenyatta University) of students and 3rd-year Mathematics students from Kenyatta University in the control group (Taken through the face-to-face course without online follow up). Specifically, it used the comparison Group Pre-test/Post-test Design. The population for this project was drawn from Bachelor of Education students of Mathematics Maseno and Kenyatta University that were taking their teaching practice in Western Kenya region, 55 lecturers from Maseno, 60 lecturers from the Kenyatta University’s School of Education, and 5 lecturers from the school of Education Linnaeus University and all secondary school principals of teaching practice school. A sample of 200 students and 55 lecturers from Kenyatta and Maseno University was drawn through the stratified random method. Stratification was based on the participants’ University of origin. The school principals were key informants in the tracer study. Data were collected through student and teacher questionnaires, online forum discussions, and documentary analysis. The paired sample T-test was used to analyze the quantitative data while thematic analysis was used with qualitative data. Findings showed that a higher percentage of students who received training completed and submitted research reports at 65% as compared to only 35% from the non-treatment cohort; the final cumulative qualitative rating of the reports indicated that students who received treatment performed much better at 80% as compared to non-treatment students at only 20% pass rate; training and creation of a community of practice in research is linked to lifelong learning practices; that at least 2% of students in the facilitated research cohort are already directly benefitting from the research training received as researchers or postgraduate students; field research exposed training gaps in classroom pedagogical and instructional practices that need to be addressed at the training level: Motivating learners in mathematics classes, effective use of resources in learning & teaching, gender issues in Math education, and influence of mathematics learning in performance of related curriculum content areas. In conclusion, the project identified the critical role of mentorship and collaboration as a driver to the emergence of industry-driven courses in HEIs and the need to integrate research in the Bachelor of Education degree program in Kenya.
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    Blended Learning Approach to Integrating Research Competency in Undergraduate Teacher Education Programme for Mathematics Students at Maseno University
    (2011) By Dr. Mildred Atieno Ayere
    Prince, Felder & Brent (2007) posits that research has a clear potential to make significant contributions to the quality of undergraduate education. In their opinion, the question is, how best to do it? University research plays a vitally important role in its own right. Therefore, rather than lamenting the rising expectations for research, it is more productive to seek ways to improve undergraduate education that work with the prevailing trends. The strategies for improving undergraduate research differ from institution to institution, but the need for integrating it in teacher education has far reaching effects. Using a scholarly approach to test potential integration strategies in teaching and learning can only increase the synergy between teaching and research to be realized in practice. Schools exist in all communities in Kenya and great potential exist when teachers become researchers. Undergraduate teachers on teaching practice are still under guidance of lecturers at the university and as such hold great potential as researchers when introduced to the skill. Mather (2011) explains that research enhanced learning and teaching is a complex notion, and consequently is based on different understandings and practices across disciplines, institutions and countries. He further explains that in its basic meaning, it is the bringing together of research and teaching with the aim of enhancing student engagement and learning. Specific ways in which it improves personal skills for participating teachers and enhances classroom instructional processes include: Positive student perceptions of the teaching and learning process; Deeper student engagement: coursework is more stimulating and interesting; Positive experiences with problem-based learning; Development of research skills: bibliographical searching, framing a research question, organisation of data, experimental skills, interpretation and analysis of data, use and understanding of primary and secondary sources; Opportunity to learn in a collaborative group setting; Improvement of self-regulated and self-directed learning as students become more familiar and comfortable with research processes; Fostering of deeper approaches to learning; Opportunity to collaborate with academics; Contribution to building on existing knowledge and participation in a community of practice; Personal and professional gains: graduate capability development, self-confidence, critical thinking, a commitment to lifelong learning, experience with teamwork, communication skills, and better understanding of how knowledge is constructed, conveyed and contested (Evans et al 2008). If all these competencies can be improved in engaging teachers in research, then integrating research in undergraduate education is worth the effort. Jenkins (2001) makes a befitting conclusion on benefits of integrating research in undergraduate teaching by saying that “Indeed, over the last five or so years, it has moved from a strong questioning of the value of (staff) research to undergraduates to advocacy of coupling teaching and research. Darden (2003) explains that learning needs to be an active process at all times. The faculty’s role is to facilitate, guide, and motivate the learning process— training students to be lifelong learners and critical thinkers. Because information in the world is constantly changing, there is need to learn how to evaluate, integrate, and apply information, not simply memorize accepted facts and theories. It is for these reasons that this study piloted a programme of teacher driven but university guided research initiative that was to improve classroom instructional processes. As Kenya seeks to be an industrial Nation through its Vision 2030 and Second Medium Term Plan 2017-2030, research in education is a must. Research integration in education is an economic driver as it is the catalyst that ensures societal problems are investigated scientifically, solutions arrived at and forwarded for implementation by relevant government agencies after results are disseminated. In this regard, integrating research in undergraduate training would create a link between the university and the community. Giller (2011) explains that National policies and strategies can play key roles in promoting the integration of research into teaching. Kenya subscribes to a number of such policies in place that are implied in a number of policy documents that guide its socio-economic development. These are policy documents such as Agenda 2063, Continental Education Strategy for Africa 2016-2025 (CESA 16-25) and its own Vision 2030 and MTP II and the STI Sector policy. In the social Pillar of Vision 2030 under Education, Kenya hopes to provide a globally competitive and quality education, training and research. Five key issues stand out in this policy that relate directly to this research: reforming secondary school curricula; modernising teacher training; strengthening partnerships with the private sector; revising the curriculum for university and technical institutes to include more science and technology; and increasing government funding to allow for this transformation. It has been noted by many scholars that Kenya needs a link that would connect training to industry in order to make its tertiary education relevant. In fact, Giller (2011) proposes that higher education students of the future should have an excellent teaching and learning experience, informed by up-to-date research; every student should learn in an environment that is informed by research, scholarship and up-to date practice and knowledge; both undergraduate and taught postgraduate programmes should develop generic skills needed for effective engagement in society and in the workplace. To him, this bottom up approach, serves to make university programmes relevant to industry that their graduates seek to serve in future. As a matter of fact, putting greater emphasis on actively engaging students with Putting greater emphasis on actively engaging students with research, suitably adapted to recognise variation and complexity of constructing knowledge in different disciplines, is one way of re-linking teaching and research in the 21st century. These sentiments are supported by outcome from institutions that have boldly integrated research in their teacher education programmes and the result (Chetty & Lubben, 2010; Deem & Lucas, 2007).
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    Building a Transformer-Based Neural Machine Translation System for English–Kibajuni Translation: A Low-Resource Deep Learning Approach for Indigenous Language Preservation
    (South Sahara Academic Publishing South Sahara Multidisciplinary, 2026-07) Anwar H. Ahmed, Wahida M. Bana, Mathew M. Egessa, Collins Kiprotich, Athman L. Omar
    Recent progress in artificial intelligence has pushed machine translation to high levels of accuracy for widely resourced languages. Yet for many indigenous and endangered languages, comparable tools remain absent, largely because digitized linguistic data are scarce. Kibajuni, a minimally documented Bantu language spoken along the Kenyan coast, illustrates this gap. Publicly accessible English–Kibajuni machine translation systems are not available, which restricts both everyday digital use and broader language preservation work.This paper reports the design, construction, and assessment of a compact Transformer-based Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system for English–Kibajuni translation. Training relied on a community-produced parallel corpus of roughly 10,000 aligned sentence pairs. A Design Science Research approach guided development of the full translation workflow, beginning with corpus preparation and continuing through Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenization, a custom encoder decoder Transformer, supervised training in PyTorch, beam-search decoding at inference time, and deployment as a web application. Because data were limited, emphasis was placed on training stability and generalization rather than increasing model size. The system therefore integrated AdamW, OneCycle learning-rate scheduling, dropout, label smoothing, gradient clipping, mixed-precision training, and early stopping driven by validation BLEU. Results indicate that, despite the small dataset, the model learned usable semantic correspondences between English and Kibajuni while remaining computationally light. The final network contains about 6–8 million parameters, occupies roughly 27 MB, and supports real time translation on modest hardware. In practical terms, the work provides one of the earliest operational English–Kibajuni neural translation platforms. At the methodological level, it offers a reproducible template for developing MT systems for other under-resourced African languages. Taken together, the findings suggest that appropriately scaled Transformer models, paired with subword tokenization and carefully tuned training procedures, can materially advance digital inclusion and language preservation for endangered languages.
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    ECD Policy Framework and Pre-Primary School Teachers’ Capacity in Quality Service Delivery in Muranga County Kenya
    (Scientific Research Publishing Inc, 2022-08-22) Kamau Joyce Muthoni, Ong’ang’a H. Ouko, Kimamo Githui
    The National Early Childhood Development Policy Framework in Kenya has been in place since the year 2006 accompanied by a service guideline to promote its implementation. The goal of the policy framework was to enhance access, equity and quality service delivery for all children from conception through 8 years. However, even with the policy in place there are quality issues in pre-primary schools in Kenya. Implementation of the framework has been slow hence affecting quality of services. This is even so with the Muranga County whose education achievement in early grades is still below the national standards. It is documented that Pre-primary schools in the County have poor infrastructure coupled with poor delivery of content at this level. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to assess pre-primary teachers’ capacity and the Quality of Service Delivery. The purpose of the study was to determine pre-primary teachers’ capacity in promoting quality service. Lilian Katz’s theory on perspective of quality was used. The study applied mixed methodology research approach in which stratified random sampling, proportionate simple random and purposive sampling were employed to select the sample. Data from; teachers, head teachers and parents was collected using questionnaire, observation schedule and interviews respectively. The study used thematic analysis for qualitative data while quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics and presented using tables and figures. The study established that Pre-primary teachers’ capacity at p = 0.023 influences quality service delivery. Subsequently, the study recommended that the government should empower/retool pre-primary teachers in order to achieve quality services.
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    Governance Practice Implementation on Education for Sustainable Development in Host Universities’ Regional Centres of Expertise, Kenya
    (Journal of Education, Society and Behavioural Science, 2021-09-10) Nancy Ng’ang’a, Ruth Thinguri and Ayub Macharia
    Institutional management refers to the effective running of different programmes and activities of an institution. This study sought to assess governance practice implementation on education for sustainable development (ESD) in host universities’ Regional Centres of Expertise (RCE) in Kenya. The study employed mixed methodology and concurrent model of triangulation and descriptive survey research design to collect both qualitative and quantitative data. The target population was from 8 acknowledged RCEs in Kenya. This included 8 RCE coordinators, 270 lecturers conversant with ESD and 150 representatives of partner institutions making a total of 428 respondents. Purposive and simple random sampling was used to come up with the study sample of 93 respondents comprising of of 3 RCE coordinators, 60 lecturers, and 30 representatives of partner institutions. Research tools used were open and close-ended questionnaires, interview schedule and document analysis checklist. Quantitative data was analysed descriptively using SPSS version 23 and presented using tables, frequencies, percentages and Pearson’s correlation coefficient. Qualitative data was thematically analysed and presented verbatim and as narratives using MS Word. Mixing and interpretation of data was then done. The study established that despite numerous challenges, RCE host universities had implemented RCE governance practice on ESD through establishment of governance structures and appointment of coordinators. Financial and infrastructural resources were found to be a main challenge in implementation of governance practice on ESD. Anticipated beneficiaries of the study findings and conclusion include the management of RCE host universities, RCE coordinators, Ministry of education and County governments. The study recommended that host universities in Regional Centres of Expertise should initiate innovative methods of raising funds from both government and private sectors to establish a funding mechanism for ESD activities and programs in the RCEs. The appointment of RCE coordinators needs to be removed from the host university Vice Chancellors and a committee of partner representatives tasked with the appointment.