Page 153 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 5
self-regulated learning strategies, such as planning, monitoring, and regulating the learning process to regulate the use of time, study environment, and e ort.
In the group of intellectually highly disengaged students, need for cognition and academic interest were lowest among all latent classes. Overall average engaged learners also scored below average on these intellectual engagement indicators. Teachers thus should pay particular attention to stimulating need for cognition and academic interest in students who do not seem to have this inside ame of curiosity burning. A useful starting activity might be to discuss with students what topics they nd interesting; search for appealing, understandable academic knowledge related to these topics; then design an enjoyable, challenging assignment around this.
Looking at the university results of the students in the group of intellectually highly disengaged students, who had the lowest university GPA and almost 1.5 SD below the average number of attained credits, and the behaviourally and cognitively disengaged students, it also seems reasonable for teachers and guidance counsellors to discuss with students who seem to have low engagement whether university is the best future path. Our data showed that 34% respectively 67.5% of these students plan to enter university. For these students, career guidance and counselling talks might provide space to explain what factors matter for a successful start in university, e.g., the adjustment factors of application and performance, and that due to the students’ current low engagement in secondary school the chances are high that he or she might end up struggling with those factors in university. Raising a student’s self-awareness then might be a rst step to remediation if the student is eager to attend university. A er that, measures to help students develop the necessary skills and attitudes might be more e ective.
e two pro les with high intellectual engagement scores but lower behavioural and cognitive engagement – the behaviourally and cognitively disengaged students and the intellectually engaged students – need their intellectual engagement to be leveraged to raise their e ort and learning strategy use. ese students like to be intellectually engaged, so in that sense they are very suitable for undertaking university education, but there may be a mismatch between their interests and the way topics are taught in school, which prevents them from transferring their intellectual engagement to the school setting. Even better than remediation that tries to re-engage these students would be prevention e orts. at is, students o en enter secondary education enthusiastically, but their disengagement grows along the way (Kuh, 2007). e crucial question, central
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