Page 149 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 5
mental e ort. Likewise, their con dence in being able to put in the necessary amount of e ort to succeed at university was substantially lower than their con dence that they could understand university-level content – as opposed to the other three groups who had more faith in their e ort than in their intellectual capability. Interestingly, even their scores on deep learning and self-regulated learning fell behind their intellectual engagement scores, while Evans, Kirby, and Fabrigar (2003) showed that these two learning strategies are associated with intellectual engagement, and Von Stumm and Furnham (2012) found a positive relationship between measures of curiosity and deep learning, and a negative one with surface learning. is nding that the association between meaningful learning strategies and intellectual engagement was not strong for every pro le also showed the added value of the person-centered research approach. Nonetheless, the fact that these two groups, as opposed to the other three groups, had higher scores on deep learning than on surface learning was in line with this previously established association in variable-centered research. e question is how this di erence between the level of intellectual engagement on the one hand and behavioural and cognitive engagement on the other hand can be explained. One explanation may be that the intellectual engagement indicators can be seen as motivational constructs, whereas the behavioural and cognitive engagement indicators such as e ort and actively applying learning strategies emphasise actual behaviour. Being motivated and being behaviourally engaged are not the same. Appleton et al. (2006) also referred to this distinction by emphasizing that motivation (or in this case need for cognition, academic interest, and being con dent in your ability to understand di cult learning content) is a necessary, but not su cient condition for engagement: “One can be motivated, but not actively engage in a task” (p. 428). Following this line of thought, one cannot assume that students high in intellectual engagement automatically are behaviourally engaged students, even though at rst sight they may seem excellent students because they may talk about academic topics that interest them or show that they enjoy cognitive endeavours such as solving di cult problems. Another explanation for the contrast between behavioural and cognitive engagement and intellectual engagement could be that these students are, although motivated for intellectual work, not motivated in schoolwork and hence do not transfer their curiosity and interest to the school context. When looking at the intellectually engaged students, who even outperform the overall highly engaged students on the indicators of intellectual engagement, these may be students who are not being su ciently
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