Page 123 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 4
Implications for practice
To raise students’ self-e cacy with regard to being a successful university student, teachers could pay attention to enhancing the factors that relate to self-e cacy. Because need for cognition is a stable trait (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982), it might be di cult for teachers to enhance students’ need for cognition, though Elias and Loomis (2002) suggest that need for cognition still might be increased by teaching practices, such as making learning tasks enjoyable.
Academic interest also represents an important contributor to self-e cacy. Our results show that students undertaking humanities/social sciences coursework had signi cantly less academic interest than students doing science coursework, which may lead them to feel less self-e cacious once they enter university. e problem could be that these students are not (su ciently) aware that disciplines such as modern languages and history are academically grounded and that academic activities, such as research, can be performed in these disciplines. ey also might not be familiar with the ways of doing research in these disciplines. Teachers could raise this awareness by discussing important academic theories, interesting recent research ndings, and enquiry methods as they relate to these disciplines, as well as requiring students to interact with the content in a more academic way, including research activities. Humanities and social science teachers could adopt the enquiry-based learning approach that is common in science courses, for example. Such practices also may have the positive side e ect of disrupting the negative image of the humanities and social sciences as less academically prestigious than science.
Research into methods to trigger, enhance, and maintain interest highlights two main types of interest: situational, which is triggered by the environment and may last for a short period, and individual, or a person’s long-lasting predisposition to re-engage with particular content over time. Situational interest always precedes individual interest (Hidi & Renninger, 2006). erefore, teachers should start by promoting situational interest, such as by creating a learning environment that makes the topic at hand interesting. For example, they should enhance task value by placing knowledge in a context that is relevant to students’ daily lives (Krapp & Prenzel, 2011) or emphasising the utility of the content (Osborne, Simon, & Collins, 2003). To trigger students’ academic interest speci cally, typical academic features should be related clearly to students’ lives. e next step is to sustain this interest, so that it can develop into a long-lasting, individual interest. Creating situations that invite students to generate their own questions helps keep them interested (Hidi & Renninger, 2006). Self-determination and a less restrictive learning environment
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