Post-admission Standalone Undergraduate Credit-Bearing ESL Courses: What Difference Do They Make?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
English-speaking universities often provide post-admission support to international students who speak English as an additional language (EAL) through standalone English as a Second Language (ESL) courses. These courses aim to improve EAL students' language proficiency and academic performance. Given the time and financial investment involved, evaluating these courses' effectiveness is essential. This longitudinal study examined the impact of standalone credit-bearing ESL courses on international EAL students’ academic achievement over ten semesters at a large Canadian university. It compared the academic performance of 1824 EAL students who took ESL courses with 1617 peers who did not, as well as 1430 domestic students. Results indicated that ESL courses were associated with higher academic performance among EAL students, achieving results comparable to domestic peers. Additionally, performance in ESL courses was positively associated with overall academic achievement. These findings highlight the importance of ESL courses in supporting EAL students and offer implications for admission policy and ESL support at university.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".