Age assessment considerations within an undergraduate MIS course: A hidden aspect of IT education

Mature-age university students over twenty-three years of age comprise approximately one fourth of the cohort of undergraduate students who enrol each semester in a foundation unit introducing management information systems. Qualitative unstructured interviews with the lecturers revealed that the mature age student cohort for this unit communicated with lecturers more frequently and in a different manner than the non-mature-age students. The investigators suspected that the academic performance of mature-age students may also be better tban the nonmature- age students as a consequence of the communication skills related to their learning style. In order to address this question, records of student perforn,ance were analyzed from the first semester of 2002. Quantitative results indicated that mature-age students performed significantly better in the unit than non-mature-age students