Abstract
Students in Health Sciences First Year (a gateway to health professional programmes) at the University of Otago sit an English diagnostic test before they begin their first semester. This test determines which students will need extra English tuition. We initiated a focusing inquiry with the 2014-2015 data from these tests to form relevant learning outcomes for students and to discover information that might be relevant to secondary schools throughout New Zealand. Our focusing inquiry revealed that many of our first-year students could benefit from further grammatical and test-taking tuition—not only because of linguistic and test-taking deficits, but also because the data demonstrate a relationship between successful placement in health professional programmes and grammatical competency. That is, our data show that students who make an error in any of the grammatical categories that we tested are less likely to get an offer of place in the Health Sciences professional programmes at the end of their first year.
Highlights
Each year, 1200-1500 students in Health Sciences First Year at the University of Otago sit an English diagnostic test before they begin their very first semester of university studies
We initiated a focusing inquiry regarding this test for two purposes: first, to form relevant learning outcomes for students who will take that extra paper; second, to provide information that might be relevant to secondary schools throughout New Zealand, as the students taking this diagnostic form a large sample group of New Zealand’s high school graduates
Our data reveal two key causes for lower marks on the reading comprehension (RC) than on the listening comprehension (LC). These causes have two implications for the paper that we provide to students who require extra English tuition
Summary
1200-1500 students in Health Sciences First Year at the University of Otago sit an English diagnostic test before they begin their very first semester of university studies. While we could answer “What is important...given where my students are at?” by quantitatively analysing the data from the extant tests, we needed to consider if our students’ gaps in grammatical knowledge were “ worth spending time on.” Which skills in English grammar and style (e.g. sentence construction, punctuation, and standardised spelling) do our students, the graduates of New Zealand high schools, possess, and do those skills relate to their larger life goals?
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