Islamic Studies and Private Universities in South-West Nigeria: Challenges and Prospects

Islamic Studies is one of the core and pertinent courses offered and taught at both private and public universities in Nigeria. The subject prepared its graduates to have potentialities, capabilities man power in teaching, administration, politics, economic, legislation and judiciary in Nigeria. Despite these significant contributions, the subject has confronted with a lot of deprivations in the enrollment of students, recruitment of staff and availability of physical and instructional materials. Based on these, the paper therefore, intends to explore the teaching and learning of Islamic studies in the south west Nigeria private universities, identify problems facing its teaching and learning and proffer solutions to these predicaments. The methodology adopted is analytical with information from both oral interview and written sources from libraries in Nigeria. Among the findings of the study are that the Subject-Islamic studies needs more experts to teach its core courses in private universities in Nigeria and students who wish to enroll for the subject should have rudiments of the discipline before admission.   

How Can Teachers Questioning Techniques Enhance Students Mathematical Understanding in a Classroom

The teaching of mathematics especially in most of the Government Schools in Pakistan is done in a traditional way. This kind of teaching helps students to memorize the rules and formulae transmitted by the teacher without understanding the rationales for them. In consequence the students develop the skills to do the mathematics but lack reasoning, and thinking in mathematics. This study was designed to explore how teachers questioning skills help small sample of Government Secondary School students to develop a conceptual understanding of the concept of fraction in class seven. Using an action research approach these students were engaged in mathematical thinking by posing activities of problem-solving questions. Probing and prompting questions which provided the researcher to assess the students understanding. Data collection in this study occurred in three steps. At the pre-intervention stage semi-structured interviews and classroom observations were conducted to ascertain how students learned and were taught mathematics in their school context. During the intervention stage the researcher posed different types of questions such as Problem-solving, Open-ended, Probing and Prompting questions to develop students understanding about fraction. At the post intervention stage, an oral test was conducted in which above mentioned question types were asked to develop their thinking skills and mathematical understanding. Post interviews with the six students were conducted to get both helping and constraining factors that emerged were specific types of questioning and purposes of asking these questions helped the students to understand the concept.