Page 154 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

to talent development and motivational research, with massive implications for the future of any society that strives to increase the number of well-prepared university students and highly educated employees, thus becomes: How can we prevent talented, curious students from becoming disengaged from high school?
5.7.4 Conclusion
In this study, we showed that there are ve distinct engagement pro les of
secondary school students. Once in university, students belonging to di erent
pro les di er from each other regarding academic adjustment and the number of
earned credits in the rst semester. e characteristics of two of these groups, the
intellectually highly disengaged students and the behaviourally and cognitively
disengaged students, are such that these students might be at risk of problems in
university: eir average university GPA was relatively low, as well as their scores
on academic adjustment, especially regarding application and performance.
Application, the extent to which students apply themselves to their academic work,
and performance, the e ectiveness or su ciency of students’ academic e orts, 5 relate to behavioural and cognitive engagement aspects, so it may be useful if these
students receive extra guidance during high school in developing for example self- regulated learning skills. Moreover, guidance counsellors and teachers could talk to students who are suspected of low behavioural and cognitive engagement about the feasibility and suitability of university education.
e impact of this study lies therein that based on a person-centered approach we showed the value of di erent dimensions of engagement and showed that a student’s speci c engagement pro le also a ects how well he or she performs in university. Secondary school teachers could use this information to address speci c shortcomings in engagement if these are clearly visible in their students. If this is not the case, then at least teachers can remind themselves to pay attention to addressing and increasing students’ behavioural, cognitive, and intellectual engagement. is could lower the risk of students facing a di cult transition or even dropping out in the rst year of university.
Pro les of student engagement
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