A failure by any other name: The phenomenon of underpreparedness

Jill Bradbury,Ronald Miller

doi:10.4102/sajs.v107i3/4.294

Abstract

This study presents an analysis of the performance of students from disadvantaged schools (DS) on first-year psychology examination questions. The analysis focuses on the process of enquiry that underpins different kinds of questions (factual, relational and conceptual) of increasing levels of difficulty. The findings indicate that success or failure is not simply a measure of the reproduction of content but is a function of the (in)appropriate form of responses that students generate in engaging with different kinds of questions. This has important implications for the conceptualisation of academic literacy and the development of responsive curricula in the South African higher education context. In order to further understand the reasons for the disproportionately high failure rate among students from disadvantaged schools, the responses of DS failing students are compared to those of their peers from advantaged schools (AS) who also failed the course. This comparative analysis reveals very different patterns of questioning engagement among the two failing groups of students, providing empirical support for the argument that underpreparedness is a distinct systemic phenomenon rather than simply failure by another name.

Highlights

The disreputable history of apartheid education and the consequence that students from certain sectors of that unequal system were deliberately underprepared for university study has been well documented.[1,2,3,4,5] More recently, with the first matriculation examination based on the OBE system in 2008 and the introduction of the National Benchmark Testing project in 2009,6,7,8 the effects of these intractable inequities in the schooling system post-1994 are again the focus of both pedagogical and political debate
It is evident from this study that different kinds of academic questions create different kinds of intellectual or cognitive demands and levels of difficulty
Because of a measure of continuity with school tasks, factual questions present the lowest level of demand or difficulty for students and most passing students demonstrate appropriate engagement with this kind of question

Summary

Introduction

The disreputable history of apartheid education and the consequence that students from certain sectors of that unequal system were deliberately underprepared for university study has been well documented.[1,2,3,4,5] More recently, with the first matriculation examination based on the OBE system in 2008 and the introduction of the National Benchmark Testing project in 2009,6,7,8 the effects of these intractable inequities in the schooling system post-1994 are again the focus of both pedagogical and political debate. Learning through the medium of a second language clearly is a further factor that places learners at a disadvantage These inequities can be expressed succinctly as a ‘lack of access’ to successive educational levels whereby a disproportionately small number of Black African students exit the school system with results that qualify them for entry to higher education. This differential selectedness[9] presents a serious challenge to universities that, on the one hand, assert the values of access based on merit and, on the other hand, understand that education is itself a major conduit for social transformation

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion