Page 133 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 5
Petty, Feinstein, and Jarvis (1996) showed that this need is modestly correlated with grade point average in high school. Intellectual engagement does not only emphasise engagement, but also interest and values (Woo et al., 2007). erefore, another useful concept to map intellectual engagement is academic interest. By academic interest, we meant a desire to gain academic knowledge in general, regardless of the eld, and to conduct research. To pursue university education, in which students are exposed to academic knowledge, students should be interested in obtaining academic knowledge in their focal eld, because interest is a powerful predictor of learning outcomes (Ainley, Hidi, & Berndor , 2002). Feist (2012) showed that a students’ level of academic interest is in uenced by need for cognition, such that students with high levels of need for cognition likely were more interested in gaining academic knowledge than were low need for cognition students.
5.2.4 Self-e cacy
Self-e cacy is a strong predictor of study success in higher education and consistently was a main predictor in meta-analyses of student success (Richardson et al., 2012; Robbins et al., 2004). Academic self-e cacy is the con dence a student has that he or she will be able to attain speci c academic goals or successfully perform certain academic behaviours. Due to its proven connection to student success in higher education, and since our study focuses on the transition to higher education, we included two measures of self-e cacy in our analyses. One of these was self-e cacy in exerting the necessary e ort that is needed to succeed in university-level studies, e.g., being con dent that one can manage to study at a regular basis and attend class even when the class is perceived as boring. is type of self-e cacy could be categorised within behavioural engagement. e second one, related to intellectual engagement, was self-e cacy in understanding di cult content, e.g., being con dent that one can follow a lecture on a di cult concept and understand di cult passages in a study book.
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