Page 74 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

learning; di erent evaluation approaches may thus in uence learners’ strategy use (Vermunt, 2005). is nuance gets lost when researchers look at students’ general strategy use as explanatory factor and to very broad outcome measures such as rst-year GPA, total number of obtained credits, and persistence.
For a number of factors, we found relationships with GPA and credits,
over the di erent countries and education levels: self-e cacy, fear of failure, expectancies, and number of contact hours. Results regarding self-e cacy, fear
of failure, and expectancies are in line with the international higher education 3 literature (Jones et al., 2010; Richardson et al., 2012; Robbins et al., 2004).
Regarding contact hours, however, there is also research that reported no e ects
or even negative e ects of the quantity of contact hours (e.g., Schmidt et al., 2010).
Moreover, the connection between number of contact hours and achievement is
not that meaningful without knowing what is happening in those hours. e fact
that we did see the connection in our review can be explained by the following:
“Very little class contact may result in a lack of clarity about what students should
be studying, a lack of conceptual framework within conceptual study can be
framed, a lack of engagement with the subject, a lack of oral feedback on their understanding, and so on” (Gibbs, 2010, p. 22). Even though they found negative
e ects of the number of contact hours, Schmidt et al. (2010) also pointed out that
a minimum number of lectures is necessary. Extensive lecturing, however, should
be avoided, so that su cient time is available for self-study, because their study
found that time available for self-study was related to graduation rate and study
duration. In our review, we also found that self-study time was positively related
to success outcomes in four of the ve investigated relationships.
For degree programme satisfaction, we found signi cant relationships with credits and persistence, which is in line with previous literature that shows that satisfaction with the programme is related to persistence (De Buck, 2009; Yorke & Longden, 2007).
3.5.2 Di erential results based on outcome measure
e vast majority of factors was each investigated by only a small number of studies (usually two or three), which makes it impossible to draw conclusions regarding di erential results based on the outcome measure that is used – GPA, EC, or persistence. On the level of the categories, however, we saw some trends. e category of ability showed many signi cant relationships, mostly with GPA and EC. Demographic factors were only signi cant predictors of success in half
Systematic review of rst-year success
73