ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT AND SCHOOL ABILITY: IMPLICATIONS TO GUIDANCE AND COUNSELING PROGRAMS
Keywords:
assessment, college freshmen applicants, general weighted averages, guidance and counseling programs, school abilityAbstract
Guidance and counseling programs, being integral parts of educational systems, are designed to assist students develop and have thorough understanding of themselves. Assessments especially those that are multi-dimensional in nature are one of the major services offered by fully-functioning guidance and counseling programs. Multi-dimensional assessment services are important since they can lead to better admissions, placements, and counseling of students. Two commonly used measures in assessment services especially on incoming college freshmen are academic achievement and school ability. In this study, academic achievement refer to general weighted averages (GWAs) as reflected in high school report cards of college freshmen applicants and school ability refer to Otis-Lennon School Ability (OLSAT) percentile ranks. To prove the values in assessment services of GWAs and OLSAT percentile ranks, GWAs of 986 college freshmen applicants were correlated with their OLSAT percentile ranks. This was done to see if relationship exists between the two. GWA is the average of grades in all subjects taken, whether passed or failed and serves as an indicator of students’ academic achievement in a given school year. On the other hand the concept of school ability that underlies OLSAT is that of general intellective ability. Specifically, it concentrates on assessing verbal-educational factor. The test measures the verbal-educational factor through a variety of tasks that call for the application of several processes to verbal, quantitative, and pictorial content. Statistical analyses showed that there were significant relationships between GWAs and OLSAT percentile ranks and were significant at the 0.01 levels.
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