Predicting the Student's Success
JN EVALUATING the results of a course of instruction an interesting question is often raised: How are the student's various previous experiences related to his success in the course? Answers to this question are important because they will show what prerequisites are necessary and what predictions of individual success can be made. In order to furnish a partial answer to this question for an elementary psychology course, the formal training, interests, and tested abilities of two groups, totaling 458 students, were recorded and compared with the final marks. For a record of past formal training, the students were asked to fill in printed forms showing the courses they had passed in high school and college. This yielded an indication of the amount of formal training rather than the quality of students' work in as much as no records were secured of marks in various courses. A record of general excellence in scholarship in college was secured in the form of the usual credit-hour ratio, but under the circumstances it was thought that such records were not obtainable in comparable form from high schools. In order to check the accuracy of a student's report, one hundred of the papers were checked with the records in the registrar's office. This check showed that these students reported their actual course work with great accuracy. The only marked difficulties came in the cases of a few students who had taken courses which were not easily classified under the usual academic groupings shown in Table I. Scores for each student were calculated by allowing half-credit in courses taken during the last four years of high school and full credit for courses taken in college. Records of a student's abilities were secured from examinations given during Freshman Week by the University authorities and from examinations given during the first week of the course itself. These examinations included the American Council on Education College Entrance Examination, the Michigan Vocabulary Profile Test, and a special test of psychological terms,. An indication of a student's interest was obtained from a mimeographed sheet on which he listed his field of concentration and the fields of psychological research in which he was most interested. The preliminary formal training of the 458 students enrolled in Psychology 3I is summarized in Table I.