'You can be good enough… you can be great!' Defining the needs of CALD students in an Accelerated Entry Pathway Program

'You can be good enough… you can be great!' Defining the needs of CALD students in an Accelerated Entry Pathway Program

While it is important from a social justice perspective to offer post-secondary education pathways to students who lack the requisite graduation marks and/or courses to gain admission to university, it is equally important to measure student success in such pathways programs. Ultimately, the purpose of pathway programs is to ensure that students obtain the necessary skills to be successful in their chosen undergraduate programs.

The Accelerated Entry Pathway Program (AEPP) is offered to Year 12 leavers through the Open Access College at the University of Southern Queensland. It replaces the former Tertiary Preparation Program Intensive Pathway (TPPIP). The program is delivered over two separate intensive on-campus blocks of two weeks each, together with online learning activities that run across the entire summer semester (11 weeks). There are two courses in the program: Transitioning to University and Applied Academic Literacies. Successful completion of AEPP provides students with the equivalent of Year 12 Academic English, and guarantees direct articulation into many USQ undergraduate programs.

This is a mixed methods study using quantitative demographic, program and survey data, together with qualitative data from semi-structured interviews collected from both the TPPIP and the AEPP programs, between 2016 and 2018. The study compares two groups: domestic students, and culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) students. The purpose of the study was to investigate and compare these two groups in terms of AEPP completion, as well as students’ transition into, and progression through, undergraduate degrees. Differences in results between the two groups during their pathway program and undergraduate studies are highlighted. Recommendations for supports for CALD students are identified.