Abstract

The General Education Foundation Programme (GEFP), a common core programme fully launched in 2012, consists of two courses, namely In Dialogue with Humanity and In Dialogue with Nature, which engage students in dialogues with the classics in the humanities and sciences respectively. The courses require students to read selected texts prior to seminar discussions. Many students reveal that reading classic texts is challenging due to the lack of relevant knowledge background and reading skills. In view of this, Peer Assisted Study Session (PASS), a widely-adopted peer learning model, has been implemented to help students to meet these challenges since the pilot stage of GEFP in 2010. Students can voluntarily participate in the weekly PASS sessions held by PASS Leaders who are students previously excelled in the same course. Informed by the regular evaluations on its effectiveness, PASS in GEFP is steadily evolving and expanding to help students read and discuss classic texts. In this poster, we will give a chronological account of the development of PASS in GEFP, including the expansion of the PASS Leader team and the PASS Supervisor team, the involvement of Senior PASS Leaders who provide peer support to their juniors, the implementation of PASS as reading workshops to emphasize both reading skills and understanding of the texts, and the application of the Socratic method by PASS Leaders to deepen discussions in PASS. Such development in GEFP can serve as a case study to illustrate how the general PASS model can be successfully adapted to target courses.