Knowledge, attitude and assessment of general study courses by students of Nnamdi Azikiwe University

Abstract

The General Studies (GS) courses are a set of Courses in the university educational system where the students are exposed to areas other than their core area of study. They are meant to broaden the students’ horizon in order to produce a well- informed individual. They are usually taken in the first year of admission. Because these courses are not in the ‘core’ area of the students study, some tend to see GS courses as unimportant and therefore perform poorly in them. We set out to look at the knowledge, attitudes and assessment of GS courses by students of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Nnewi campus whose courses of study are related to human health. It is hoped that the information gained from this study will help the School of General Studies (SGS) improve the set of GS courses taken by these set of students. This is a questionnaire based study where a set of questions covering the purposes of the study are administered to students that have gone beyond the first year and had taken the GS courses. These are the set of students that we considered in a position to give a good assessment of the programme. They comprised studying the various programmes in the Nnewi campus including Environmental Health Sciences, Health Sciences and Technology, Basic Medical Sciences and Medicine. They were requested to rate the various aspects of the SGS using a scale of 5 – 1. There was also a space for free comments to accommodate for whatever issue bordering the students that we may have missed in the main body of the questionnaire. 185 respondents were analysed. The attitude of the students towards the GS courses is generally very good and they considered GS courses very relevant to whatever courses they are pursuing. The conduct of the GS examinations and the manner of the release of the results were considered excellent. They complained that the venues for the lectures are inadequate and that many of the lecturers do not give the lectures as scheduled. They thought that the buying of the GS textbooks should be made optional. On the individual courses, they considered 101, 102, 108, 109 excellent, 103, 104, 106 very good and 105 and 107 just good. This study concludes that GS courses are very relevant and the students have very good disposition towards the courses. The problems of inadequate lecture venues and some lecturers who do not give their lectures appropriately need to be addressed.