Page 115 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 4
on a scale from 1 (‘never’) to 5 (‘daily’). Pilot testing showed that these items did not need any adaptation. Out-of-school academic activities had su cient internal consistency (α = .77).
Following Bandura’s (1997) de nition of self-e cacy, we conceptualised academic self-e cacy as the belief a student has in his or her capabilities to organise and execute the courses of action that are required to be a successful university student. e items that we used therefore re ected typical academic skills that students need for their university studies, such as being capable of independent study, understanding di cult subject matter, and being able to write essays (Jansen & Suhre, 2010; Krause, 2001; Lowe & Cook, 2003). Because the participants were still in secondary education, we clearly described the required academic skills and started the question block of academic self-e cacy with an explanation of what studying at university is like. For example, we explained the di erence between lectures and seminars, to give the participants the necessary context to answer questions that focused speci cally on these settings. A er pilot testing and subsequently removing redundant items, six of the original 15 items remained. Students rated their con dence that they would be able to perform these skills successfully on a 4-point Likert-scale (1 = ‘not con dent at all’; 4 = ‘very con dent’). Examples included, “Studying three academic books thoroughly for a test” and “Writing an essay on an academic subject in your own eld of interest, based on research evidence”. is factor achieved an internal consistency of α = .70. All the measures are summarised in Table 4.1.
Table 4.1 Means, standard deviations, number of items, Cronbach’s alpha, and minimum and maximum values
Variable
Need for cognition
Academic interest
Behavioural engagement
Out-of-school academic activities
Self-e cacy
M SD
3.42 0.48 2.89 0.68 3.60 0.78
2.26 0.73 2.58 0.48
Range
Potential Actual
1–5 1.67–4.89 1–4 1.00–4.00 1–5 1.00–5.00
1–5 1.00–4.57 1–4 1.00–4.00
n items α
18 .83 6 .87 8 .87
6 .77 6 .70
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