Page 14 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Introduction
and a pre-BSA cohort. Another measure which is more and more o en applied 1 in university programmes to increase student success is the implementation of
learning communities. Learning communities are a form of small-scale teaching.
One of the goals of learning communities in the rst year is that students adjust
faster to university as a result of close peer collaboration and close contact with a teacher or mentor. Although learning communities have positive e ects on friendship formation and self-e cacy, in practice, academically able students o en pair up with each other, as do the academically less able students, which may lead to segregation (Brouwer, 2017). Since these are all recent initiatives, there is not much information available regarding their (long-term) e ects on student success. In any case, it is clear that plenty of e ort is devoted to improving student success in universities and that it is a well-researched area: A substantial number of studies have been published in the research area of postsecondary student success, especially on rst-year success, since research showed that a student’s success in the rst year is indicative of his or her success in subsequent years (Hurtado, Han, Sáenz, Espinosa, & Cabrera, 2007; Jansen & Bruinsma, 2005).
In contrast, not much attention has been given to the pre-transition phase. What factors are related to students’ readiness for university before they make the transition? Can successful and less successful university students already be identi ed in secondary school? Do secondary school teachers believe preparing their students for university is part of their job? How do they contribute to their students’ readiness? In this thesis, we will answer these questions as well as questions that are related to students’ academic adjustment and success once they are in the rst year of university. In this Introduction, rst, the concept of transition will be described. en, we will elaborate on the Dutch context of this research and the generalisability to non-Dutch education systems. ird, university readiness will be de ned and conceptualised and we will give a brief overview of previous research into university readiness. Next, theories in the broader research area of student success in higher education will be discussed, a er which we zoom in on the concepts that play the leading and supporting parts in our studies. Finally, a er having described the main aims and research questions, we will give an overview of the ve chapters that form the body of this thesis.
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