Entry-level students’ reading abilities and what these abilities might mean for academic readiness

Cliff, Alan

doi:10.1080/10228195.2014.958519

Cited by 23 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…These findings confirm and augment those reported by Cliff and Hanslo (2009) Fleisch, Schöer and Cliff 2015). Furthermore, studies have also shown that school-leavers embarking on university studies are generally inadequately prepared to cope with the language-of-instruction demands of studies in higher education (Ramukumba and Gravett 2004;Cliff 2014 and2015).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pre-admission tests of learning potential as predictors of academic success of first-year medical students

Wadee¹,

Cliff

2016

SAJHE

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Whilst performance in the school-leaving examination may be a good predictor of academic achievement at medical schools, it is not necessarily a perfect one. The Health Sciences Placement Tests (HSPTs), comprising four components, were adopted by several South African universities as a tool to understand student preparedness. Of 127 first-year students at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2010, those from private schools performed significantly better academically than their public school counterparts on overall HSPT performance and in the Academic Language test, and marginally better in the Mathematics Achievement and Mathematics Comprehension tests. Students from private schools performed better at first-year level in the subjects of Psychology and Fundamentals of Medical and Clinical Sciences. The Academic Language and Mathematics Comprehension tests showed significant correlations with performance in first-year subjects, both at midyear and year-end assessments. The study points to the importance of the HSPTs as an additional tool in predicting and understanding academic success at first-year university level.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pre-admission tests of learning potential as predictors of academic success of first-year medical students

Wadee¹,

Cliff

2016

SAJHE

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“…So in language testing and course design, we depend on the construct of the language ability which is the focus of these interventions. In respect of academic language ability, this paper refers cursorily only to the latest rationale, but its history and how it was arrived at are discussed at length elsewhere Weideman 2013a, 2013b;Weideman, Patterson and Pot 2016;Cliff 2014Cliff , 2015; the paradigmatic origins of this in the work of sociolinguists such as Hymes (1972), Habermas (1970) and Halliday (1978) have also been noted in more detail in Weideman, Du Plessis and Steyn (2017).…”

Section: The Critical Importance Of a Theoretically Defensible Definimentioning

confidence: 99%

Definition and design: aligning language interventions in education

Weideman

2019

SPILPLUS

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The management of language diversity and the level of mastery of language required by educational institutions affect those institutions from early education through to higher education. This paper deals with three dimensions of how language is managed and developed in education. The first dimension is the design of interventions for educational environments at policy level, as well as for instruction and for language development. The second concerns defining the kind of competence needed to handle the language demands of an academic institution. The interventions can be productive if reference is made throughout to the conditions or design principles that language policies and language courses must meet. The third dimension concerns meeting an important requirement: the alignment of the interventions of language policy, language assessment and language development (and the language instruction that supports the latter). This paper employs a widely-used definition of "academic literacy" to illustrate how this definition supports the design of language assessments and language courses. It is an additional critical condition for effective intervention design that assessments and language instruction (and development) work together in harmony. Misalignment among them is likely to affect the original intention of the designs negatively. Similarly, if those interventions are not supported by institutional policies, the plan will have little effect. The principle of alignment is an important, but not the only, design condition. The paper will therefore conclude with an overview of a comprehensive framework of design principles for language artefacts that may serve to enhance their responsible design.

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“…(Fleisch et al 2015: 167) Not only did Fleisch et al's (2015) study reveal that English FAL school-leavers perform poorly overall on the NBT AL when compared to their HL counterparts, it also showed that this too was the case at the level of the subdomains of academic literacy that constitute the construct of academic literacy as defined for this test. These subdomains include students' ability to recognise/understand/use cohesion, communicative function, essential versus non-essential information, grammar (syntax), inferencing, metaphorical expressions, discourse relations, text genre, and vocabulary (see Cliff and Yeld 2006;Cliff 2014Cliff , 2015. With regard to differential performance between the two groups on the ability to work out the meaning of vocabulary in context, Fleisch et al (2015: 170) found that the gap for the students whose marks in English HL and FAL were around 60% was less than .5 of the standard deviation, but that this gap widened as these marks increased.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Validating the performance standards set for language assessments of academic readiness: The case of Stellenbosch University

Sebolai

2019

SPILPLUS

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Twenty-five years into the post-apartheid period, South African universities still struggle to produce the number of graduates required for the country's socioeconomic development. The reason most often cited for this challenge is the mismatch that seems to exist between the knowledge that learners leave high school with, and the kind that academic education requires them to possess for success. This gap, also known as the "articulation gap", has been attributed to, amongst others, the levels of academic language ability among arriving students. The schoolleaving English examination, and a pre-university test of academic literacy are the commonly used measures to determine these levels. The aim of this article is to investigate whether predetermined standards of performance on these assessments relate positively with academic performance. In order to determine this, Pearson Correlations and an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were carried out on the scores obtained for these assessments by a total of 836 firstyear students enrolled at Stellenbosch University. The results show that the performance standards set for the standardised test of academic literacy associate positively with first-year academic performance, while the scores on the levels of performance set for the school-leaving English examination do not.

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Entry-level students’ reading abilities and what these abilities might mean for academic readiness

Cited by 23 publications

References 10 publications

Pre-admission tests of learning potential as predictors of academic success of first-year medical students

Pre-admission tests of learning potential as predictors of academic success of first-year medical students

Definition and design: aligning language interventions in education

Validating the performance standards set for language assessments of academic readiness: The case of Stellenbosch University

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