Page 15 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 1
1.2 The transition issue
Students face di erent transitions during their educational career: ey start school, they move from Kindergarten to grade 1, from primary to secondary education, and from secondary to postsecondary education. Depending on the education system of a country, there may be even more transitions, e.g., from primary to middle school in the United States or from one level of secondary education to a higher or lower level of secondary education in countries with a di erentiated secondary school system such as the Netherlands. Each transition comes with its own challenges, but the transition from secondary to higher education can be perceived as particularly challenging, as it coincides with the life transition into adulthood, which is o en linked to increases in risk-taking behaviour (Fromme, Corbin, & Kruse, 2008; Schulberg & Maggs, 2002; White et al., 2006). About one third of all students in the Netherlands move out of their parental house when they start their postsecondary studies (Kences, 2016), which means that for many students the transition not only entails academic but also social adjustment to the new situation, e.g., dealing with freedom and independence.
Chickering and Schlossberg (2002) de ne a transition as an event that results in changed relationships, routines, assumptions, and roles to which the one undergoing the transition has to adjust. Schlossberg (2008) developed a model of four resources that have an impact on how well a person deals with a transition: situation, support, self, and strategies. ese resources may be positive, i.e., assets, or negative, i.e., liabilities. While Schlossberg refers to transitions in general, we will discuss the four types of resources with the transition from secondary school to university in mind. e rst one, situation, concerns the situation in which the student faces the transition. An important situational characteristic of the transition from secondary school to university is that this transition is anticipated, which means that a student can (be) prepare(d) for it. Another situational aspect relates to the timing of the transition. An example is that when a student faces other major life events simultaneous to the transition to university, the timing can be bad. Furthermore, the situation is in uenced by whether or not the student has dealt with similar transitions before and how these transitions were experienced. Students who experienced a very di cult transition from primary to secondary education may be extra anxious with regard to another educational transition. Next, support refers to the extent and quality of available support systems. Important sources of support can be 1) family members, especially for continuing-generation
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