Page 130 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

is intellectual engagement. Ackerman, Kanfer, and Go (1995), p. 276) de ned intellectual engagement as “a personality construct that represents an individual’s aversion or attraction to tasks that are intellectually taxing and is thus related to acculturative and purposeful development and expression of certain intellectual abilities”. Broadly speaking, intellectual engagement thus refers to individual di erences in the tendency to engage in intellectual activities. In this study we will focus on behavioural, cognitive, and intellectual engagement.
Previous research consistently showed positive relationships between
engagement factors and learning outcomes (Klem & Connell, 2004). Especially
in the last decades many studies on student engagement have been performed.
Some notable outcomes include that engagement deteriorates over the years
(Schlechty, 2002) and that girls are more highly engaged than boys (Goodenow,
1992; Yazzie-Mintz, 2007). Yazzie-Mintz’s (2007) large-scale study of data on more
than 80.000 high school students in the United States found that 72% of students
indicated that they were engaged in school, leaving many students disengaged.
To conclude, Willms (2003) made a crucial note by stating that engagement does 5 not predict academic success for each and every student, since OECD research
showed that many disengaged students still perform well academically. However,
also disengaged but well performing students are at risk to experience a di cult
transition to higher education: Whereas their intelligence may have made it
possible for them to obtain su cient grades during high school, this may not be
the case anymore in higher education, where the demands are higher.
A typology of secondary school students, based on dimensions of engagement, might provide a rough view of which groups of students seem more or less prepared for university. Methods such as cluster analysis, or the increasingly popular latent class analysis (for categorical data) or latent pro le analysis (for continuous data), provide the tools to make such a typology. ese methods are person-centered approaches, and di er from variable-centered approaches, such as correlational analysis. e bene t of a person-centered approach is that it is able to shed more light on combinations of characteristics within the individual (a ‘pro le’) by examining which di erent pro les can be found based on a number of indicator variables. Consequently, analyses can be performed to investigate how these di erent pro les are related to other variables. What we were interested in here is to investigate which di erent engagement pro les could be distinguished in high school students and how these pro les were related to the same students’ success later on when they were studying at university. erefore, we sought to
Pro les of student engagement
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