Predicting Academic Success of Health Science Students for First Year Anatomy and Physiology

Abstract

Students commencing tertiary education enter through a number of traditional and alternative academic pathways. As a result, tertiary institutions encounter a broad range of students, varying in demographic, previous education, characteristics and academic achievement. In recent years, the relatively constant increase in tertiary applications in Australia has not translated to an increase in student retention or graduate numbers. The Health Sciences discipline typically falls within this paradigm, prompting various approaches to promote academic success and overall student retention. In this study, the demographic and previous education of health science students at an Australian University, were analysed along with first year science grades from a core first year anatomy and physiology unit. A generalized linear model (GLM) demonstrated statistically significant relationships between performance in the unit (measured by grade point average) and year 12 Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank (ATAR) subjects (human biology and chemistry; p<0.001) and gender (p<0.001). No significant performance correlation was observed with household socioeconomic status, as measured by socio-economic indexes for areas. Taken together, the results from this study facilitate estimation of academic success by some parameters prior to their commencement at University.

Student Perceptions to Teaching Undergraduate Anatomy in Health Sciences

“…Students in all cohorts reported a significant increase for all body systems, although lower levels of confidence were reported for students in the HPE cohort preand post-completion. These findings persisted in final unit grades, with the HPE cohort having an average of 56.2% compared to higher grades for the BESS and BMS cohorts (64.6 and 69.4%, respectively), a trend previously observed in first year anatomy and physiology (Anderton, Evans, & Chivers, 2016). While these results may reflect investment of the students in the unit (i.e.…”

Tertiary Academic Success: A Review of Factors in the Context of Ecological Model

“…Several factors related to tertiary academic success have been identified in studies including gender (Anderton et al, 2016), self efficacy (Trigwell, Ashwin, & Millan, 2013), high school success (Smith & White, 2015), and less use of internet (Mishra, Draus, Goreva, Leone, & Caputo, 2014). This review paper analyzes these factors within the ecological model presented by Dalton et al (2007).…”

“…A large body of empirical evidence suggests women to be more academically successful than men generally (Anderton et al, 2016;Arshad, Zaidi, & Mahmood, 2015;Richardson, Abraham, & Bond, 2012;Soria, Fransen, & Nackerud, 2013) and to be more A grade achievers than men (Smith & White, 2015). Smith (2016) used the data of 38,236 students taken from a British university's administrative records, who entered the university between 1998 and 2006, and found women to be more successful than men.…”

“…Results of studies on the role of age in tertiary academic success have been inconsistent, with both positive and negative reported correlations (Anderton et al, 2016). For instance, Richardson et al (2012) in their systematic review and metaanalysis pointed out that older students are more successful than younger in the same batch but the effect size is small.…”

“…The layers are individual, microsystem, organizations, localities and macrosystem. Notably, admissions to tertiary institutions have increased in past few years but number of people who get their degrees has not increased (Anderton, Evan, & Chivers, 2016). In 2016, 75% of the world population was adult among whom only 7% were with graduation degree (Erickson & Vonk, 2016).…”