Department of Economics

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Browsing by Subject "Academic performance"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Exploring student engagement practices at a South African university : student engagement as reliable predictor of academic performance
    (Higher Education South Africa (HESA), 2016) Schreiber, Birgit; Yu, Derek
    Student engagement is one avenue to explore how the experiences within and beyond the classroom impact student persistence behaviours. This article contributes to the sparse research in South Africa on the correlates of student engagement with academic performance at a Historically Disadvantaged University. The results suggest that engagement practices at this university differ across race and gender and that given the South African history we are able to generalise onto the South African higher education system. Influences on persistence and academic success are complex and require a comprehensive approach which embraces the entire context into which student persistence behaviours are embedded. Student engagement patterns are reliable predictors of academic performance and the trends across race and gender suggest that engagement and academic performance remain differentiated along race and gender.
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    Exploring student engagement practices at a South African university: student engagement as reliable predictor of academic performance
    (SUN, 2016) Schreiber, B.; Yu, Derek
    Student engagement is one avenue to explore how the experiences within and beyond the classroom impact student persistence behaviours. This article contributes to the sparse research in South Africa on the correlates of student engagement with academic performance at a Historically Disadvantaged University. The results suggest that engagement practices at this university differ across race and gender and that given the South African history we are able to generalise onto the South African higher education system. Influences on persistence and academic success are complex and require a comprehensive approach which embraces the entire context into which student persistence behaviours are embedded. Student engagement patterns are reliable predictors of academic performance and the trends across race and gender suggest that engagement and academic performance remain differentiated along race and gender.
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    Factors explaining the academic success of second-year economics students: an exploratory analysis
    (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2011) Horn, Petronella; Jansen, Ada; Yu, Derek
    Factors influencing the academic success of first-year economics students have been intensely researched. Lecture and tutorial attendance, age, gender, as well as matriculation results have been identified as significant in explaining academic performance. The academic success of senior students, however, has received less attention in South Africa. This paper presents the findings of an investigation into the academic performance of second-year economics students at Stellenbosch University. Using a Heckman two-step model, the study analyses whether the factors explaining first-year academic success are applicable in the second year or if other factors are relevant. The results suggest that most matriculation subjects become statistically insignificant for second-year students, whereas lecture and tutorial attendance remain important contributors to academic success. Furthermore, academic performance in the first year is an important determinant of success in the second year.
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    Investigating factors influencing class attendance and performance of first-year economics students
    (Stellenbosch University, 2021) Swanepoel, Christie; Beukes, Roelf; Yu, Derek
    The academic success of first-year Economics students has been examined in many South African studies in Economic Education. These studies controlled for differences in demographic characteristics, last school examination (Matric) subjects and results, as well as lecture and tutorial attendance when investigating differences in students’ performance. While there is an abundance of international studies investigating the main reasons for attendance or non-attendance, these studies are rare in the South African context, especially in the field of Economics. Hence, this study fills the existing local research gap by investigating factors influencing lecture attendance as well as their possible impact on the performance of first-year Microeconomics students at the University of the Western Cape.
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    What explains the academic success of second-year economics students? An exploratory analysis
    (Stellenbosch University, 2008) Yu, Derek; Horn, Pietie; Jansen, Ada
    The factors influencing academic success of first-year Economics students have received much attention from researchers. Very little attention, however, has been given to the determinants of success of senior Economics students. In the USA, Graunke and Woosley (2005: 367) indicate that college sophomores (second years) face academic difficulties, but this receives little attention in the literature. Economics is an elective subject for second-year students at Stellenbosch University. The academic performance of the second-year students has shown a decline, as compared to the first-year Economics performance and the faculty’s average performance. An observed phenomenon at Stellenbosch University is the poor attendance of lecture and tutorials by second year students, some of the factors than can perhaps explain why students perform poorly. This phenomenon may be explained in part by second year students losing interest in academic activities, focusing on other social commitments. This study investigates the academic success of second-year Economics students. It adds to the existing literature on the factors affecting the academic success of Economics students by focusing on the second-year students (a much neglected group in empirical studies, particularly in South Africa). The empirical analyses confirm some of the existing findings in the literature, namely that lecture and tutorial attendance are important contributors to academic success. We also find that as students progress to Economics at the second-year level, their performance in individual matriculation subjects is less relevant, except for those students who had taken Additional Mathematics. However, the matriculation aggregate mark is significant in explaining the academic performance, in a non-linear way. An important finding is that non-White students tend to perform more poorly in essay writing (one of the components of the course mark in the second year) than White students.