Page 108 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Self-e cacy in being successful at university
4.2 Literature review
4.2.1 Need for cognition
Need for cognition is “an individual’s tendency to engage in and enjoy e ortful
cognitive endeavours” (Cacioppo, Petty, Feinstein, & Jarvis, 1996, p. 197). Cacioppo
et al. (1996) categorise it as a personality variable. An important di erence
between individuals high in need for cognition and those low in need for cognition
is that the former are more likely to try to make sense of (di cult) information
themselves, actively acquire information, and think about and re ect on things,
whereas the latter rely on others or external cues to provide information and the
structure to make sense of it. Notably, a key di erence between the secondary
school learning environment and the university learning environment is the level 4 of structure provided. At university, students are expected to be independent
learners who manage their own learning process and tackle di cult information by themselves. High need for cognition students thus may be more con dent in their ability to study independently and have more con dence in their success at university. As Elias and Loomis (2002) have shown, need for cognition increases students’ academic self-e cacy beliefs. erefore, in our model, we used need for cognition as a personality factor that a ects academic self-e cacy directly, as well as indirectly through out-of-school academic activities, academic interest, and engagement – variables we describe subsequently.
4.2.2 Academic interest
Hidi and Renninger (2006, 112) suggested that interest is a motivational variable that “refers to the psychological state of engaging or the predisposition to re-engage with particular classes of objects, events, or ideas over time”; Schunk, Pintrich, and Meece (2008, p. 210) de ned interest as “people’s liking and willful engagement in an activity”. ese de nitions stem from person-object theory, which states that interest emerges from a person’s interaction with the environment or an object, which is not necessarily tangible and thus can refer to a topic, idea, activity, or subject matter (Hidi & Renninger, 2006). Research has revealed a relationship between interest and self-e cacy, though there is some disagreement about the direction of this relationship: Does self-e cacy precede interest, or is the relationship reciprocal? Some evidence implies that interest in uences self-e cacy (Chen et al., 2016), which Hidi (2006) explained by noting that self-e cacy grows through the pursuit of interest-driven activities that invoke positive a ect.
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