Page 150 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

challenged in school and consequently have become bored and disengaged in class. An important task for secondary school teachers is to try to ignite these students’ curiosity, interest, and self-estimated capability of understanding di cult subject matter in such a way that their actual e ort in school work will rise. is is important, because these students may be at risk of underachieving and this study showed that these students may experience a di cult transition to university: e academic adjustment scores of the behaviourally and cognitively disengaged students were lowest of all groups on almost all indicators – even lower than the scores of the intellectually highly disengaged students (the students who were disengaged overall and showed very low intellectual engagement).
When looking at the background characteristics, one interesting nding
was that the two groups discussed above consisted of signi cantly more male
students. Having relatively high intellectual engagement but lower behavioural
and cognitive engagement thus seemed to be a typical male engagement pattern.
is is consistent with research that shows that boys put less e ort into schoolwork
(Fischer, Schult, & Hell, 2013). Boys’ poor e ort is a problem that continues to 5 contribute to the growing gender gap in education. To prepare boys better for
university and lower their risk of dropping out, strategies that increase their
e ort to learn should be a central focus. Another interesting background nding
was that students pursuing a science track in high school could be found more
o en in the group of intellectually engaged students, whereas humanities/social
sciences students were overrepresented in the intellectually highly disengaged
group. As Figure 2 showed, these two groups were at the opposite ends of the
spectrum of intellectual engagement indicators, so science students seemed to
have a higher need for cognition, more academic interest, and more con dence
in their capability to understand di cult content than humanities/social sciences
students. First of all, this could be self-selection. In grade 10, students chose
their track. ose students who were not particularly intrinsically intellectually
engaged may have opted for humanities/social sciences coursework because
according to a widespread stereotype in the Netherlands this high school track
would be less challenging (Groot, 2016). However, it could also be the case that
students’ intellectual engagement was being aroused more in science subjects than
in humanities/social sciences subjects, for example because in the former subjects,
teachers more o en apply enquiry-based learning (Anderson, 2002).
To conclude, among groups of students, it is reasonable to distinguish between intellectual engagement on the one hand and school-related behavioural
Pro les of student engagement
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