TY  - JOUR
KW  - Critical thinking
KW  -  Pedagogy
KW  -  Higher education reform
KW  -  Higher education policy
KW  -  Architecture
KW  -  Rwanda
A1  - Schendel, R
EP  - 504
IS  - 4
Y1  - 2016/08/18/
TI  - Constructing departmental culture to support student development: Evidence from a case study in Rwanda
VL  - 72
N2  - In recent years, there have been numerous attempts to improve the quality of higher education in Africa, but there is limited knowledge about the impact of these initiatives on student learning. The results of a study published in 2015 offered some initial data in this regard by identifying a lack of improvement in the critical thinking ability of students enrolled at three of Rwanda's public universities, despite extensive pedagogical reforms across the sector. However, subsequent analysis of the study data suggests that this lack of improvement is not a general phenomenon, as students graduating from the KIST Faculty of Architecture & Environmental Design appear to exhibit deeper approaches to learning and stronger critical thinking skills than graduates with similar backgrounds from other Faculties involved in the study. This paper examines the factors that appear to have contributed to this outlying Faculty's success and argues that departmental culture has played a crucial role, by fostering the conditions necessary for pedagogical innovation.
SN  - 0018-1560
SP  - 487
AV  - public
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10734-016-0036-6
ID  - discovery1507872
N1  - Copyright © The Author(s) 2016. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
JF  - Higher Education
PB  - Springer Verlag (Germany)
ER  -