Understanding Taylors College Student Academic Attributes

Abstract

There is an expectation that students graduate from university with a collection of graduate attributes they have acquired and/or developed during their university journey. To test this claim 70 foreign and predominantly Chinese students at Taylors College, Auckland, NZ enrolled on a one-year UoA Foundation Certificate programme completed a voluntary on-line survey at two time points (May2017 and November2017). The survey measured self-rating of UoA graduate attributes; (1) Answer Seeking, (2) Love of Learning, (3) Curiosity, (4) Perspectives/Ideas, (5) Cultures/Groups, and (6) Backgrounds/Individuals. CFA established an adequate fit for the time1 and time2 data and all six attributes exhibited measurement invariance. The results were analysed to evaluate (1) Which graduate attribute(s) did students self-report themselves as high and low, (2) Were different graduate attributes rated high or low at different times in the academic year, and (3) Were changes in self-rating graduate attributes related to changes in academic performance.Three groups of respondents were selected; the entire-group (n=70), the top-academic group (n=23) and lowest-academic group (n=23). The entire-group rated Answer Seeking and Love of Learning high and Cultures/Groups and Backgrounds/Individuals low at both time1 and time2. However, at time1 the top academic group rated Answer Seeking high and Cultures/Groups low and the lowest academic group rated Backgrounds/Individuals high and Curiosity low. At time2 the top-group rated Perspectives/Ideas high and Curiosity low and the lowest-group rated Answer-Seeking high and Culture/Groups low. Although no single graduate attribute was scored high or low by all three groups at both time points and none of the effect size results were statistically significant and, thus, considered trivial to small and unfortunately, no inferences about relative ranking can be made. However, the lowest-group reduced their self-rating and their academic grades decreased slightly. Hence, perhaps the lowest-group believe the attributes require academic capabilities and, thus, if they feel their personal academic grades are falling then they also feel their personal attribute skills are falling as well. However, the study was able to replicate the Grays and Brown (2015) Graduate Profiles Outcomes Research Project and apply a six factor structure to analyse pre-university students self-scoring of graduate attributes expected at university and, thus, by completing the online questionnaires the respondents further developed their self-reflection skills, which is a graduate attribute.