Page 13 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 1
success con rmed that a substantial number of students struggle with time management and self-regulation, especially in the rst semester (e.g., Haggis, 2006; Van der Meer, Jansen, & Torenbeek, 2010). Even for highly able students the required self-regulation and time management skills can be problematic, because many of them went through secondary school without having to exert much e ort and therefore never felt the need to learn how to learn (Balduf, 2009; Grobman, 2006). Wintre et al. (2011) reported that as many as half of all university students obtained a lower GPA in university than they did in secondary school.
Fortunately, improving university students’ success is a primary concern of the Dutch government and of the universities and thus receives a lot of attention. Measures that have been taken to improve retention and decrease delay include ‘matching’, the binding study advice (BSA), and the incorporation of learning communities in rst-year programmes. Matching (sometimes referred to as the study choice check) is a procedure with the goal of obtaining an optimal t between the student’s capacities and interests and a degree programme. Moreover, it aims to make sure the student has realistic expectations of the programme he or she plans to pursue. Matching is mandatory: Once a student applies for a degree programme, he or she has to undergo the matching procedure. Universities are free to choose what matching activities they o er, which has the consequence that these activities vary from having students complete a short questionnaire or participate in an intake interview to having students take part in a class and in some cases even take a test to see to what extent the student is able to handle the content of that class. Results of the matching procedure are informative only and do not deny a student access to the degree programme. As such, matching does not serve as a selection mechanism for institutes, but intends to function as a self-selection mechanism by showing students to what extent a programme suits them. e BSA refers to a binding advice the student receives a er one year of study. is advice can be positive or negative. In the latter case, a student is not allowed to continue the programme. A student receives a negative BSA when he or she does not obtain a certain minimum of credit points a er one year of study. Programmes can decide upon their own threshold. For many programmes, the minimum number of credits required is 45 (out of 60), but in some programmes it is as high as 60. Preliminary research showed di erent e ects of the BSA on student success. Arnold (2015) found that in large degree programmes the BSA had a positive e ect on time-to-degree, but De Koning, Loyens, Rikers, Smeets, and Van der Molen (2014) found no di erences in achievement between a BSA cohort
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