Page 151 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 5
and cognitive engagement on the other hand. at is, our person-centered analysis clearly showed that the students with high need for cognition and academic interest were not necessarily the same students who also put in the necessary e ort in their school work and adopted useful learning strategies, even though variable- centered approaches implied that curiosity related positively to e ort (Chamorro- Premuzic, Furnham, & Ackerman, 2006; Go & Ackerman, 1992). Identifying this distinction clearly is an important result, because research indicates that both being curious and putting in e ort are important for academic performance (Von Stumm et al., 2011), a result that our research also showed, since the overall average engaged and overall highly engaged students had the highest GPA in university and were most adjusted to their university studies.
5.7.2 Limitations
An important limitation of this study was that all the measures were self-reported. Self-reports can cause social desirability biases. Students also might not be able to rate their own behaviour and cognitions accurately, such as their use of learning strategies. Moreover, the amount of explained variance in the outcomes in university was rather low. Adding predictors in future research might increase this amount. It would, for example, be interesting to add personality traits, as the meta-analysis of adjustment research by Credé and Niehorster (2012) showed that these in uence academic adjustment. Since these traits are relatively stable, they can already be measured in secondary education. Another limitation is that the number of students who lled out the follow-up questionnaire in university was relatively low and that female students were overrepresented in that sample. Moreover, regarding two of the ve latent pro les there may have been some response bias in play: e percentage of university students belonging to the group of behaviourally and cognitively disengaged students was substantially smaller than the percentage of grade 12 students belonging to that group (7.8% in university and 14.2% in grade 12), whereas the percentage of university students in the pro le of intellectually engaged students was higher than the percentage of grade 12 students belonging to this pro le (35.6% in university and 21.5% in grade 12). Since we have no achievement data of students who did not respond to the questionnaire at university, we cannot test whether these students were performing worse than the students who completed the questionnaire. It seems plausible, however, that students who are more engaged in their education are more likely to respond to a questionnaire about how well they are doing in
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