Marked for Success -- Secondary School Performance and University Achievement in Biology
Journal article, 2011

Building on Shulruf, Hattie and Tumen (2008), this work examines the capacity of various National Certificate in Educational Achievement (NCEA)-derived models to predict first-year performance in Biological Sciences at a New Zealand university. We compared three models: (1) the ’best-80‘ indicator as used by several New Zealand universities as a predictor of grade point average (GPA); (2) the ’best-80‘ as a predictor of outcome grade in biology courses and (3) ’domain status‘ in biology and chemistry as a predictor of outcome grade. These models span quantity, quality and competency measures in examining student performance and success at both university-wide and specific disciplinary levels. Results show that the models explain between 25 and 45% of the variance, which may present challenges if one of these models were to become the sole determinant for enrolment and limitation of entry policies, but can be useful in an advisory capacity.

New Zealand NCEA

Biology first year student success

university entrance exam and first year GPA

Author

Keith Comer

Centre for Language and Communication (Chalmers)

Erik Brogt

Kaylene Sampson

Australasian Association for Institutional Research (AAIR) Journal

1443-2110 (ISSN)

Vol. 16 2 42-53

Subject Categories

Learning

Biological Sciences

Pedagogy

Areas of Advance

Life Science Engineering (2010-2018)

More information

Created

10/6/2017