Page 139 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij
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Chapter 5
engagement measure, and the second one, self-e cacy in understanding, as an addition to intellectual engagement. We did not use social self-e cacy, because that was outside the scope of this study.
Background variables
We investigated how the pro les related to gender, choosing a science or humanities/social sciences track, high school GPA and whether students planned to attend university a er graduation from high school. High school GPA at the moment of research participation was provided by the administrative boards of nine of the 11 participating schools, such that we had 546 students’ GPAs. e Dutch grade point system ranges from 1 to 10, where grades above 5.5 are satisfactory and grades above 8 are good.
Academic adjustment and achievement in university
To answer our second research question about how the latent pro les related to measures of university success, we investigated how latent class membership linked to academic adjustment and achievement of the same students one year later. An overview of these outcomes is available in Table 5.2. We measured students’ academic adjustment with the academic adjustment subscale of the Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ) by Baker and Siryk (1984). is scale consists of 24 questions that involve coping with the academic demands of the university experience. Baker and Siryk (1984) distinguished between four facets of academic adjustment: motivation, which refers to students’ attitudes toward academic goals and the academic work they have to do; application, which refers to how well students apply themselves to their academic work; performance, which concerns the e ectiveness or su ciency of students’ academic e orts; and environment, which is about how satis ed students are with the academic environment. In line with Baker and Siryk’s internal consistency measures for the scale, which ranged from α = 0.82 to 0.87, the alpha of our scale was 0.86. Reliability of the four subscales ranged from 0.70 to 0.81.
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