Page 110 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Self-e cacy in being successful at university
based way of thinking and therefore may be more self-e cacious regarding their university studies. Little research has addressed this type of activity speci cally, so we included this variable as an exploratory construct and investigated whether it would a ect students’ academic self-e cacy.
4.2.5 Background variables
We included three background variables in this study: gender, parental educational level, and type of coursework. e rationales for including them were either that prior research has linked them to the measured constructs or because little research has addressed the relationship between a speci c background factor and a measured construct, and we sought to examine this relationship.
Gender 4 No consistent gender di erences in self-e cacy have appeared in previous
research (Choi, 2005; Hampton & Mason, 2003), but gender seems to in uence
one of the intermediate variables that may lead to academic self-e cacy; research
consistently showed that girls are more engaged in school than boys (Lam et al., 2012; Marks, 2000). Regarding need for cognition, Cacioppo et al.’s (1996) review of individual di erences indicated no gender di erences in total scores on the need for cognition scale. Regarding academic interest and out-of-school academic activities, we found no research on gender di erences. us, we had no speci c expectations regarding gender di erences in these factors.
Parental educational level
Parents’ cultural capital in uences their children’s academic achievement (Jaeger 2011). Parents with higher educational levels create more stimulating home environments and interact more with their children around learning activities (De Graaf, De Graaf, & Kraaykamp, 2000; Eccles, 2005). According to the parent socialisation model, these in uences enhance children’s engagement in educational activities, as demonstrated empirically by Davis-Kean (2005). erefore, parental educational levels could be related to both engagement and academic out-of- school activities. Moreover, in line with Bourdieu’s cultural and social capital theory, parents who have attended university themselves should be more familiar with university-level learning and thinking and foster similar kinds of learning and thinking in their children (Devlin, 2013). Hence, the parents’ educational level could in uence students’ need for cognition and academic interest.
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