Does self-regulating e-learning assist in secondary school preparation for engineering education?

One of the most prominent issues in engineering education is the proper preparation of prospective engineering students in the subjects of mathematics, physics, and English during their senior secondary school years. South Africa is particularly disadvantaged in this regard as international assessments have shown South African secondary students have consistently been shown to perform poorly in this regard. In order to try to address this issue, a proposed solution is through the use of IT (Information Technology) to provide individualized instruction in these subjects using a multi-media platform. Some advantages of using IT for instruction is that it provides better differentiation of instruction that can be tailored to an individual´s learning style and enables students to take charge of their own learning. This IT solution, with the research conducted therein, was provided through a privately-funded interventionist program for Grade 11 students who attend IT-aided classes in mathematics, English, and physics for six hours every week at a university of technology. In this paper, we determine the effects of this program in terms of their school final subject Grade 11 grades relative to their school Grade 10 baseline.