Browsing by Author "Sebolai, Kabelo"

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    Validating the highest performance standard of a test of academic literacy at a South African university
    (Stellenbosch University, 2020) Sebolai, Kabelo; Stanford, Fiona
    Poor graduation rates are a serious concern worldwide. In South Africa, this concern has escalated in the post-apartheid era wherein a democratic constitution has widened access to higher education for school-leavers. The socioeconomic and school backgrounds of the majority of these learners still hamper their timely completion at university. In order to combat this, local universities have implemented some necessary interventions. Such interventions are geared towards dealing with the academic language needs of incoming students. For the last two decades or so, standardised tests of academic language ability, now commonly known as academic literacy, have been used to determine these needs. Given the expected impact of these interventions on student completion rates, the importance of the validity of these tests cannot be overemphasised. The aim of this article is to investigate the validity of the highest performance standard set for one of the tests currently used to assess levels of academic literacy. Using 14 610 scores obtained on that test by first-year students at a South African university, in tandem with their average scores on completion of their first year, sensitivity and specificity statistics were computed to realise this aim. The results revealed that the performance standard investigated was valid 61% of the time.
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    Validating the performance standards set for language assessments of academic readiness : the case of Stellenbosch University
    (Stellenbosch University, 2019-09-12) Sebolai, Kabelo
    Twenty-five years into the post-apartheid period, South African universities still struggle to produce the number of graduates required for the country’s socio-economic 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 school-leaving 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 first-year 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.