Authentic Learning in African Post-Secondary Education and the Creative Economy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Authentic learning is a branch of constructivism, a pedagogical approach that places the student at the center of the learning experience. This instructional model has undergone gradual adoption in first-world countries, with underdeveloped countries still struggling to implement a systematic approach for incorporating authentic learning in the classrooms. In the meantime, the global economy has evolved from an industrial, factory-based economy to one involving the manipulation of knowledge. Consequently, the implementation of authentic learning has assumed an increased importance within education systems around the world, especially at the post-secondary level, where instructors need to prepare new graduates for a modern, service-oriented workforce. Authentic learning teaches the required soft skills that students can transfer from one situation to another: collaboration, communication, critical thinking, creativity, innovation, problem solving, and decision-making. In African countries, most teachers still use an instructivist, or teacher-centered approach to lesson planning and delivery, forcing students to learn through the memorization of isolated facts. This type of learning, which continues through all levels of education, leaves students unprepared for the twenty-first century workforce. Consequently, the following paper argues that African countries require a centralized and systematic approach for revising their education systems to promote authentic learning opportunities. The literature has enumerated the benefits to authentic learning, including enhanced motivation and learning outcomes for students as well as advantages for other stakeholders such as teachers. In addition to academic benefits, authentic learning also contains economic advantages by enhancing students’ readiness for the working world and citizenship duties as well as benefitting employers, individual sectors, and overall economies. Although Africa faces many hardships, including a paucity of resources, a wholesale revision of their education systems will ultimately prove advantageous in the long term. This modification requires the coordinated efforts of all stakeholders, starting with governments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".