Abstract
Research identifies student academic performance success as an important element in achieving and maintaining the quality of teaching, accreditation and university reputation. This study examines the influence of prior knowledge and gender on the academic performance success of students in the foundation commerce program at the National University of Sāmoa (NUS). It employs a quantitative regression analysis approach to provide empirical evidence of the correlations between the two variables associated with student’s academic success in the formal assessments undertaken by foundation-level students, in the academic years 2001 and 2007. The findings suggest that students’ prior academic performance success in the disciplines of Accounting, Economics, English and Mathematics, strongly influence their academic performance at the foundation level. In addition, gender differences indicate that female students performed significantly better than males in accounting and economics courses for both the secondary and foundation year. This study provides a contribution to the literature on student academic performance success and the findings also provide implications for educators, administrators, policy makers to design curricula and assessment for accounting courses to cater for students and for higher education enrolment policies.
Keywords: Accounting Education, Academic success, Prior learning and gender
