Die voorspelling van die akademiese prestasie van alternatiewelik toegelate studente

[摘要] English: Several considerations in post-apartheid South Africa compel historically whiteuniversities in particular, to admit more black students. Because of inequalitiesin the education system, the majority of black students have not been given anequitable opportunity to prepare for university studies. As academic failure canlead to large-scale financial and personal losses, it is essential to maximisethese students' chances for academic success. Universities try to achieve thelatter objective by employing two strategies. Firstly, selection methods areused to admit only those educationally disadvantaged applicants with sufficientprospects for academic success. Secondly, bridging and support programmesare implemented in an attempt to eliminate the academic drawback ofeducationally disadvantaged students.In view of the above, the University of the Orange Free State (UOFS) hascreated alternative admission channels for educationally disadvantagedstudents. For example, in some cases students with matriculation exemption,but lacking the minimum prescribed matriculation performance, are admittedconditionally to the university on the basis of a psychometric evaluation and acounselling interview. In the current study these students were referred to asdiscretionarily admitted students. The support interventions for suchdiscretionary admissions in their first year are less intensive than an extensivebridging programme. Doubt exists about the validity of traditional predictors (Le. matriculationperformance and aptitude tests) for predicting academic performance ofeducationally disadvantaged students. Noncognitive predictors may be morevalid in this regard. However, South African research on both the prediction ofthe academic performance of educationally disadvantaged students and theeffectiveness of academic bridging and support programmes is limited. Theresearch results that are available, produce contradictory findings. In the first place this dissertation dealt with the prediction of academicperformance of discretionarily admitted students on the basis of theirmatriculation performance, scholastic aptitude, English reading understanding,personality traits, interests, faculty of registration, gender and age. Secondly,the effectiveness of the interventions to improve their academic performancewas studied.The first research question was studied by combining all the predictorssimultaneously in a standard multiple regression equation. Apart from theinterest field of sociability, none of the predictors (that is, including thetraditional predictors) correlated statistically significantly (at the 5% level) withthe first-year performance of discretionary admissions. The value of themultiple correlation coefficient (R = 0.58) however did not deviate so muchfrom the (simple) correlations found typically between the matriculation anduniversity performance of educationally non-disadvantaged students. In spiteof the shortcomings of this study, it would appear that the use of traditionalpredictors for selection decisions on discretionarily admitted students areunder suspicion. The sociability score of these students apparently do haveprediction value. The second research question was studied by comparing the universityperformance of discretionary admissions with the performance of a group ofdirectly admitted black students as well as two other groups of alternativelyadmitted black students. This was done by means of co-variance analyses (onthe basis of hierarchical multiple regression analyses) of academicperformance in the first, second and third years of study in which matriculationperformance was controlled as co-variant. In all three years of study, groupmembership explained significant amounts of the variance in universityperformance in addition to the variance already explained by matriculationperformance. The results of this study therefore suggest that after differencesin previous academic performance was taken into account statistically, thesupport interventions that discretionary admissions are subjected to might be effective, but not for all such students, particularly not in the second and thirdyear

[发布机构] University of the Free State