Page 122 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Self-e cacy in being successful at university
in out-of-school academic-related activities, such as looking up news on academic topics on the Internet or reading or watching research-based documentaries. e Internet is becoming a primary medium for informal learning; research also shows that boys spend more time than girls looking up information on the Internet (Vekiri & Chronaki, 2008). Another explanation could be that boys feel less at home in the school learning environment than girls and more o en hold negative attitudes and perceptions toward school (Archambault, Janosz, Morizot, & Pagani, 2009), but because they are not less curious, they have a higher tendency than girls to search for information elsewhere, to satisfy their curiosity.
4.5.2 Implications
Implications for theory and research 4 Much research in the elds of education and psychology focuses on self-e cacy,
but insu cient studies speci cally investigate the role of self-e cacy beliefs in
important transitions in education, such as the transition from secondary school
to university (Chemers, Hu, & Garcia, 2001). We have demonstrated that need for cognition, academic out-of-school activities, and academic interest relate to students’ academic self-e cacy, but other personality, behavioural, or motivational factors also might increase students’ con dence in their ability to be successful university students. It would be worthwhile to establish which factors play a role and develop a more comprehensive model of the pathways to self-e cacy.
Furthermore, the stability of self-e cacy during a transition would be an interesting focus of study. Do students who graduate from pre-university with high levels of self-e cacy maintain these high levels through their rst semester at university? On the one hand, the change in their learning environment and its accompanying demands could cause a disruption in students’ sense of being competent learners (Christie, Tett, Cree, Hounsell, & McCune, 2008). On the other hand, self-e cacy beliefs should transfer from one context to another, comparable context (Bandura, 1977). e question thus becomes, are the secondary school and university learning environments comparable enough for students who are highly self-e cacious at the end of secondary education to avoid su ering a signi cant drop in their academic self-e cacy during the di cult transition?
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