Page 106 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Self-e cacy in being successful at university
4.1 Introduction
In countries that are part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), on average, one third of all students entering higher
education drop out before completion of their study programme (OECD, 2013).
e rst-year university dropout rate in the Netherlands, where the present study
was conducted, is similarly high: In 2012-2013, 33% of university students did not
continue on to the second year of the study programme they had started (Inspectie
van het Onderwijs, 2016). e rst-year experience of students is crucial for overall
academic success in higher education: If a student is successful in the rst year of
higher education, he or she is more likely to graduate from university (Evans &
Morrison, 2011). erefore, rst-year study success in higher education is a well- 4 researched topic. According to two in uential, international reviews, in addition
to previous achievement and standardised test scores, consistent non-cognitive predictors of achievement in university settings include self-e cacy, achievement motivation, grade goals, and e ort regulation (Richardson, Abraham, & Bond, 2012; Robbins et al., 2004). e primary predictors of retention were academic goals, academic-related skills, and self-e cacy (Robbins et al., 2004). us, self-e cacy functions as a crucial predictor of study success, impacting both achievement and retention. In their recent review, Honicke and Broadbent (2016) found a moderate correlation between self-e cacy and performance among university students.
Self-e cacy refers to a person’s perception of his or her ability to perform adequately in a given situation (Bandura, 1997). Academic self-e cacy in a university setting can be conceptualised as the student’s belief that he or she can perform well in university-speci c tasks, such as mastering the content of academic textbooks for a test and writing an essay to answer a research question. is construct is generalised (i.e., not related to any speci c domain of study) and transferable over di erent programmes of study in the university (Gore, 2006). Research on academic self-e cacy among rst-year university students has shown that even though students’ level of self-e cacy is above average in an absolute sense, there is substantial variance, including many students with low levels of self-e cacy (e.g., Chemers, Hu, & Garcia 2001). Institutes for higher education might seek ways to enhance their students’ self-e cacy, but it also seems legitimate to ask how secondary education can contribute to students’ self-e cacy, even before they make the transition to university. In the Netherlands, the secondary school system is highly di erentiated; the highest level, pre-university, aims to
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