Page 22 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Introduction
1.5.2 Overview of constructs that may impact a student’s transition 1 In the following part, we present a sneak preview of the constructs that will appear
throughout this thesis as (possible) in uencers of university readiness and/or
success in university. Some of them are lead players who appear regularly in the
di erent chapters, e.g., academic adjustment and academic motivation, whereas others play a smaller – but by no means insigni cant – part. We will now de ne these factors and explain why they may matter in the transition.
Academic adjustment (Chapters 3, 5, and 7)
We start by addressing the notion of academic adjustment, as it serves a double role in this thesis: In Chapter 3 it is an explanatory factor, in Chapter 5 an outcome factor, and in Chapter 7 both. Basically, academic adjustment can be perceived as the operationalisation of a successful transition. As we discussed above, a transition implies change in relationships, routines, assumptions, and roles (Chickering & Schlossberg, 2002) and this change calls for adaptation (Schlossberg, 2008). e better a student adjusts to the new situation, the better the transition. In that way, the extent of adjustment is the result of a student’s interaction and experience with the new learning environment. We follow Baker and Siryk’s (1989) de nition and de ne academic adjustment as the ability to cope with the academic demands of the university environment. It consists of four distinguishable aspects (Baker & Siryk, 1989). e rst one is motivation, which refers to being motivated to learn and having clear academic goals. e second aspect, application, concerns the extent to which a student applies himself or herself to academic work. Performance is the third aspect, which is about how well the student succeeds in meeting the academic demands. Last, environment refers the student’s satisfaction with several characteristics of the new learning environment, e.g., the content of the courses and quality of instruction. Taken together, these four aspects form the construct academic adjustment and provide an adequate measure of how successful a student’s transition was. Separately, the aspects provide a more detailed insight into a student’s experience of the transition. In Chapter 5, where we were interested in di erences between students as to how successful their transition was, we used academic adjustment as an outcome variable. In Chapter 7, we investigated which factors were related to academic adjustment and what the magnitude was of the impact of academic adjustment on the three outcome variables of student success in university: GPA, number of obtained credits, and the intention to persist. e rationale in this chapter is that much research has pointed at the importance
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