Page 114 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Self-e cacy in being successful at university
sciences interests, we avoided mentioning speci c disciplines and emphasised that this section of questions focused on general academic interest, regardless of the eld. Students had to answer on a 4-point Likert-scale (1 = ‘completely disagree’; 4 = ‘completely agree’). e academic interest scale was highly internally consistent (α = .87).
In line with prior literature, we developed a questionnaire with three
components of student engagement: behavioural, cognitive, and emotional. ese
three components were measured with self-reported questions on a 5-point
Likert scale (1 = ‘does not describe me at all’; 5 = ‘describes me very well’). We
took the items from existing instruments that measured components of student
engagement, such as the Student Engagement Instrument (Appleton, Christenson,
Kim, & Reschly, 2006), the Student Engagement in Schools Questionnaire (Hart, 4 Stewart, & Jimerson, 2011), Engagement versus Disa ection with Learning
(Skinner, Furrer, Marchand, & Kindermann 2008), and the Identi cation
With School Questionnaire (Voelkl, 1996). To develop our measure of student
engagement, we proceeded through three steps. First, we chose items that appeared
in multiple existing instruments and that clearly related to behavioural, cognitive,
and emotional engagement, then translated them into Dutch with a back-
translation procedure, resulting in an initial version of the instrument. Second,
we tested this initial version with a small number of students in upper-grade, pre-
university classes. ird, we conducted analyses to eliminate any redundant items
and establish the psychometric qualities of the instrument. e nal version of the
instrument consisted of 19 items: eight measuring behavioural engagement (e.g.,
“I actively participate in class”, α = .87), ve measuring emotional engagement
(e.g., “I enjoy most classes in school”, α = .70), and six measuring cognitive
engagement (e.g., “In school you learn important things”, α = .76). In this study,
we only used behavioural engagement.
To measure out-of-school academic activities, we used six items, each consisting of an academic-related activity that can be performed at home, such as “Watching television programmes with an academic touch, e.g., documentaries on Discovery Channel or documentaries on psychological topics” or “Reading research news items in the paper or on news websites”. Similar to the measure of academic interest, we put e ort into ensuring that these items were not skewed in the favour of people with science interests. For example, we included examples of both science and non-science academic activities in the items, as the sample items indicate. Students noted how o en they performed each of these activities,
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