Academic Preparedness Reimagined
How can we prepare students for postgraduate study?
Academic preparedness, or interchangeably referred to as college readiness, has been described as the required academic knowledge and skills a student needs to enroll into and succeed in the educational institution (Barnes, Slate & Rojas-LeBouef, 2010; Camara, 2013; Conley, 2010).
In the literature on academic preparedness, Conley (2007) presented a four-dimension model that could serve as the basis to define the students’ academic preparedness, namely key cognitive strategies, academic knowledge and skills, academic behaviors, and contextual skills and awareness capabilities.
Besides providing an explication of this four-dimension domain, Conley (2007) urged that educational institutions need to have a comprehensive concept of academic preparedness to allow students to prepare beforehand so they can add value to their education and not merely navigate the college system.
In practice, most universities have imposed academic skills and knowledge standards that the students have to demonstrate prior to their enrollment.
Through English proficiency tests and cognitive assessments such as GMAT or essay, some universities secure the students who have more tendency to be successful in the study (Eddey & Baumann, 2009).
However, as argued by Conley (2007), there are academic skills a college student needs to have besides the cognitive domain and these characteristics are beyond the level of the high school students.
Furthermore, each program, department, degree, or university has different academic expectations and requirements toward its students (Bamber et al., 2017). Given this complexity, it is important to clearly articulate these requirements and expectations to help the students within their transition.
We need a framework…
An established framework is needed to identify the classification of academic expectations and requirements of a student so that any future student can prepare for it.
A framework from a project named the Learning from International Practice (LFIP) is built to shape the expectations and requirements of a postgraduate student.
Below is the explanation of the seven master’s facets from the LFIP project (QAA, n.d.).
This nationwide project in Scotland has developed seven master’s facets namely, abstraction, autonomy, complexity, depth, professionalism, research, and unpredictability, that could help educators to learn about what is being a master’s degree student (QAA, 2013).
The facets incorporated into this framework are interrelated with the four-dimension model proposed by Conley (2007) and can be used as the foundation to identify how strong and likely the students can navigate their postgraduate study.
