GCE performance of FE and sixth‐form college students

Abstract

This study set out to examine and identify differences in GCE O/A-level performance of a sample of further education and sixth-form college students, employing selected biographical, intellectual and dispositional measures. The sample comprised 356 two-year, full-time students who entered further education and sixth-form colleges immediately after completing their fifth-form work in schools. The results show that taking account of students' dispositional characteristics significantly increases the explained variation in attainment beyond that accounted for by intellectual ability and previous examination performance. Also indicated are significant differences in the factors associated with examination success; these are shown to be related to students who attend different types of institution. The findings would appear to have implications for current policies concerned with the educational provision for students in the 16-19 age range.

Intelligence, personality, and interests: Evidence for overlapping traits.

“…Aggregation of within-sample effect sizes. Several studies used multiple measures of personality or ability that fell within a single personality-ability classification (e.g., Clarke, 1985). Rather than allowing a single sample to contribute more than one correlation to a personalityability classification (thereby ignoring the nonindependence of the relations) or simply choosing one of the correlations at random (thereby losing the information contained in the other relations), we chose to use an aggregated estimate by computing the mean correlation (using Fisher's z-transformed correlations).…”