Quantifying how Secondary Schools Translate Student Core-skills into University Admission

Abstract Book of the 11th International Conference on New Approaches in Education

Year: 2026

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Quantifying how Secondary Schools Translate Student Core-skills into University Admission

Dr. Andrew Laming, Prof. John Hattie, Prof. Mark Wilson

ABSTRACT:

Nations with universal standardised testing and secondary school graduation rankings can use Percentile Shift Analysis (PSA) to quantify how successfully core-skills are translated by schools into tertiary access. These findings assist students to select their senior subjects, and parents to predict likely secondary outcomes. This workshop format guides educators on how to simply, reliably and validly perform PSA across a range of assessment models, without the need for statistical training. PSA in the Australian context compared the relative benefits of strong reading and numeracy on graduation scores, the influence of test trend over time, and the reliability of predicting graduation rank using primary school standardised test scores. PSA also quantifies school academic selection, and uses stratified academic analysis to identify which students in which schools achieve significant gain, with potential composition effects identified, and the impact of school-SES on secondary school gain ruled out.

Keywords: Gain; Numeracy; Percentile; Quality; Reading