Proceedings of The 6th International Conference on Future of Teaching and Education
Year: 2022
DOI:
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Fighting Stigma: Remediation vs. Supplemental Instruction
Faiçal Ben Khalifa
ABSTRACT:
Remedial classes targeting at-risk students in a pre-college preparatory program in Oman appear to be doing a disservice to the very students the program intends to support. The ‘culprit’ behind the dysfunctionality of the remedial intervention remained a matter of guesswork until this research was conducted. The aim of this study is twofold: (a) to uncover the reasons behind the inefficacy of the remedial intervention and (b) implement another academic support intervention and evaluate its effectiveness. A mixed methods embedded design approach was used to triangulate different perspectives and viewpoints of the task-force overseeing the remediation intervention, the tutors and tutees, using purposeful sampling. The remedial intervention was found to suffer from inherent issues to do with labelling and stigma. To overcome the issue, supplemental instruction (SI) was implemented on the same category of underperforming students and was found to not only overcome the stigma issue, but to yield better results.
Keywords: academic student support, intervention, remedial, stigma, supplemental instruction.