Page 225 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 8
should take place before students have chosen their coursework. In Dutch pre- university education, this would be at the end of grade 9. In this way, we could gain insight into whether it is the uptake of science coursework that contributes to a student’s need for cognition and academic interest or the student’s need for cognition and academic interest that makes it more likely for him or her to choose a science track. It would be interesting to follow these students in higher education until they graduate, so that the results of each consecutive year as well a nal outcome measure – e.g., time to graduation – can be taken into account. However, following students for such a long period of time, i.e., a minimum of four years of secondary education and four years of higher education, is rather challenging. It is feasible as long as the students are still in secondary school and the school sta is interested in and dedicated to contributing to such a study. It is then possible for questionnaire administration to be embedded in class once or twice a year. Once the students have made the transition to higher education, however, it becomes increasingly di cult. Students will have to be contacted individually and they will have to keep up their commitment to participating in the study on an individual basis. e longer the longitudinal research, the higher the research dropout rate. Incentives may help, but still the odds are high that the sample will decrease in size and be biased towards the more serious and better achieving students. ese challenges explain why many longitudinal studies in educational research are, unfortunately, mostly based on administrative data.
8.4.2 Focus on the secondary school learning environment
e lack of learning environment characteristics in our models was an important limitation of this thesis. In order to provide secondary schools with better recommendations for improving students’ university readiness, more research should be conducted about what kind of learning environment contributes to university readiness. First of all, we need to get to the bottom of the science versus humanities/social sciences coursework issue. In what ways and to what extent do these tracks provide students with a di erent learning environment? Can these di erences in learning environment be related to students being less or more ready for and successful in university? In the discussion of our ndings above we already described some indications that suggest science coursework prepares students better for any degree at university than humanities/social sciences coursework, but we need to corroborate these ndings by conducting a study that is speci cally designed to answer research questions related to this issue. is kind of research is
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