Page 107 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 4
prepare students for university. In this sense, an important goal of pre-university education should be to contribute to students’ self-e cacy, or their con dence about ‘making it’ at university, to help prepare them well for university education.
In addition to being a predictor of achievement and retention, self- e cacy has been linked to characteristics that may help students cope e ectively with challenges, such as the transition from secondary to university education. Students who are highly self-e cacious exert more e ort and persevere in their learning, show higher levels of intrinsic motivation, are better at regulating their learning processes, undertake more challenging tasks, are more likely to adopt a mastery approach to learning, experience less stress in demanding situations, and adjust better in new learning situations (Bassi, Steca, & Delle Fave, 2010; Bong, 1997; Caraway, Tucker, Reinke, & Hall, 2003; Chemers, Hu, & Garcia, 2001; Geitz, Joosten-Ten Brinke, & Kirschner 2016). e last two aspects in particular are extremely important in the transition from secondary education to university, which is stressful for many rst-year students and during which the level of adjustment in uences achievement (Germeijs & Verschueren, 2007). Chemers, Hu, and Garcia (2001) found that self-e cacy in the rst year in higher education relates strongly to adjustment, even a er controlling for secondary school GPA. us, “con dence in one’s relevant abilities (i.e., self-e cacy) plays a major role in an individual’s successful negotiation of challenging life transitions” (Chemers, Hu, & Garcia, 2001, p. 55), and academic self-e cacy represents a crucial determinant of a successful transition from secondary school to university. Accordingly, students’ self-e cacy already should be high, even before they start their university studies, rather than waiting for rst-year programmes to take measures to raise students’ self-e cacy a er they have started.
erefore, we sought insights into which personality, motivational, and behavioural variables might in uence secondary school students’ self-e cacy regarding being a successful student in university. e personality variable we tested was need for cognition; the motivational variable was academic interest; and the two behavioural variables were out-of-school academic activities and behavioural engagement – all variables that likely relate to self-e cacy (e.g., Chen et al., 2016; Elias & Loomis, 2002; Marks, 2000). ese variables also are generally amenable to change, so secondary school teachers arguably could address them (Hidi & Renninger, 2006; Linnenbrink & Pintrich, 2003). To the best of our knowledge, no previous research has investigated secondary school students’ self- e cacy with regard to being a successful university student.
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