M. A. / The inequalities regarding opportunities for the various cultural groups in South Africa to obtain access to tertiary education, could largely be attributed to the insufficient schooling that was available to black scholars until now. A new political dispensation and the coupled drastic changes to the educational system, including tertiary institutions, demands that the admission policies regulating the access tot tertiary education be reviewed and changed to provide for the educationally disadvantaged student. The Rand Afrikaans University created an alternative admission policy to accommodate educationally disadvantaged students and or students who do not qualify in terms of the usual admission criteria. Apart from certain minimum requirements, the policy requires that the learning and developmental potential of the prospective students be established. Language proficiency, intelligence, learning potential and other non-cognitive components are elements of the alternative evaluation. RAU found that the admission policy creates the necessity to research the predictive validity of the cognitive part of the test battery, with regard to the criterium academic performance. This research project attempted to assess whether the psychometric test battery which the University uses, within the framework of an academic support programme called Project 100, can be viewed as valid in predicting future academic performance of these students. The battery includes the measurement of intelligence by means of the LSAT; learning potential as assessed by the APIL; as well as language proficiency that is measured by using the Leesbegripstoets and the Reading Comprehension Test. M-score was also included into the statistical procedures, as to see whether the predictive validity of this factor is really as low as it is generally assumed. The statistical procedures that were employed to establish the predictive validity, included correlation coefficients for determining the validity of the individual components. Multivariate regression analysis was performed to determine the predictive validity of the components of the battery in conjunction with each other. Using the technique of discriminant analysis, the success of grouping through the test battery was assessed - looking at the proportion of the cases correctly classified into the categories pass, fail, and no admission to exam; and the categories successful and unsuccessful. The individual correlation coefficients revealed that each component correlated significantly with academic performance. M-score also correlated with academic performance, but this coefficient was the lowest of all the factors. The component which correlated highest with academic performance, was language proficiency. The GSAT and the APIL correlated to the same extent with performance, and the relationship between the two instruments was also relatively high. This implies that these two instruments probably measures the same construct. The results from the regression analysis proved M-score, APIL and the GSAT in combination to explain more of the variance in academic performance than any of these factors individually. M-score seems to explain other aspects of performance than intelligence and learning potential, and should for this reason be reckoned with when assessing a prospective student's potential success. The discriminant analysis showed that the tests successfully distinguish between the categories successful and unsuccessful, but not between the three categories pass, fail and no admission to exam. The factors should however never be seen in isolation. No single factor can predict academic performance to the full. The person should be seen as a whole, and the influence of non-cognitive factors should always be kept in mind.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uj/uj:3535 |
| Date | 05 September 2012 |
| Creators | Nel, Annette., Nel, Annette |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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