Bridging Academic Gaps: How to Assist Underprepared Students whose Academic Background was Highly Suppressed by Covid-19?

The objectives of this study were to investigate the degree to which first-year students are underprepared for university physics due Covid-19 pandemic, and get insight on what could be the intervention strategies with which their conceptual gaps can be bridged by higher education institutions. This was achieved by conducting a qualitative study on a sample of 72 students who are enrolled in extended engineering programmes in a South African university. The collected categorical data was analyzed using descriptive statistics. The results of this study show that more than half of the respondents did not complete the matric physics syllabus and were extremely underprepared for their university physics lectures. In particular, they lack conceptual understanding of Newtonian mechanics. These students welcome the idea of being given lecture videos and/or in-person lectures/workshops, by the university, with which they could revise the matric syllabus before they start attending university physics classes. Moreover, the results reveal that the majority of students appreciate the coupling of the foundation physics and mainstream physics modules. The results further show that it could be more effective to have students simulating half of their physics experiments in a computer before they conduct them in a laboratory.