Contemporary technology, along with the tangible/virtual duality of present-day learner consciousness, are, in the authors' opinion, necessitating and enabling a fundamental educational transformation. A central feature of this development will be 'letting the learners lead', including (from secondary onwards) their identification of the content…

Students who perform well at school academically are more likely to complete Year 12 and experience smoother transitions from education to employment. However, disentangling the effects of prior academic achievement on later performance from other confounding factors, such as socioeconomic status, has proved difficult. This study uses data from…

England has a 'pre-qualification' system of higher education admissions, where applications and offers are made to young people before exam results are received. While in most cases offers are conditional on achieving a grade target in A Level exams, recent years have seen an exponential growth in 'unconditional offers', where the offer of a place…

This study introduces data mining methods to accounting education scholarship to explore the relationship between accounting students' current academic performance (grades), demographic information, pre-university entrance scores and predicted academic performance. It adopts a C4.5 classification algorithm based on decision-tree analysis to…

This paper investigates admission procedures of Master of Arts programs of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (MA TEFL) in Iran in comparison with universities around the world. Along with a view of the centralised national MA TEFL entrance exam held in Iran during the past three decades, we investigated admission requirements for comparable…

This article presents a longitudinal study, over eleven years, of the academic progress of a cohort of design students (n = 475) at a major Australian university. The students were from four different spatial design disciplines: architecture, industrial design, interior design, and landscape architecture. The article identifies cognitive variables…

Self-determination theory (SDT) and the job demands-resources (JD-R) model of burnout have been identified as important in understanding psychological distress among university students. This study aimed to investigate key factors influencing distress (depression, anxiety, stress and burnout) among students, using stepwise multivariate regression…

This study investigated the interrelationships among university entrance score, career aspiration, academic major, and academic achievement, of foundation year students, at an overall level and at completion of each year level of a Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree. Self-determination theory (SDT) was used as the underlying model for this study,…

Mounting criticism suggests that the recent introduction of a 'gatekeeping' test to improve the quality of teachers in Australia--the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education (LANTITE)--has had limited success in achieving its aim. Shaped by a discourse of inputs on how teacher quality might be achieved ('quality in, quality out'),…

The previous two decades have seen much improvement in the first-year experience of students attending university. Yet for a significant proportion of students, coping with university study remains challenging. This is particularly the case for those students entering university with low tertiary admission scores. Although the higher education…

This is the first study that examines the comparative validity of the Chinese National College Entrance Exam (known as Gaokao) to a Western end-of-secondary-school performance measure, Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR), as admission criteria to an Australian undergraduate degree programme. The study offers a strong warning about using just…

The possibility that the validity of assessment is compromised by repeated sittings of highly competitive and high profile selection tests has been documented and is of concern to stake-holders. An illustrative example is the Undergraduate Medicine and Health Sciences Admission Test (UMAT) used by some medical and dental courses in Australia and…

This article explores factors contributing to unequal patterns of access to languages other than English (LOTE) in Australian universities. A critical analysis of qualitative and quantitative data generated through interviews, surveys and document analysis reveals that underrepresentation in LOTE courses in Australian universities is attributable…

The use of integrated tasks to test English-speaking skills raises questions about the impact of comprehension on test score outcomes, and the impact of stimulus materials on test-taker strategic behaviours. This study analysed speaking performances and verbal report data to examine the strategies used by test takers at different levels of…

The focus of recent Australian political and media reports on the selection of candidates for initial teacher education programs has focused on the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) score as one of the key indicators of worth. This narrative study conducted in an Australian regional university focuses on the life stories of twelve…