Page 16 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Introduction
students (i.e., students whose parents have also attended university); 2) peers, in 1 particular if they will start at the same university; 3) secondary school teachers
with whom the student has a good relationship and who may have studied a similar
degree as the one the student is about to embark on; 4) student organisations in
the university environment, e.g., study associations, fraternities and sororities, and sports clubs, and 5) university faculty members who may take on a mentoring role for rst-year students. ird, self refers to factors belonging to the individual: personal and demographic factors and psychological characteristics. Especially the latter have great impact on how a student deals with the transition. Several self factors will be discussed extensively throughout this thesis. Last, strategies are coping responses, i.e., the way in which the student deals with the transition. Schlossberg (2008) distinguishes four main possible responses of dealing with the change caused by a transition: 1) modifying the situation; 2) changing the meaning of the situation; 3) controlling and managing the situation; and 4) taking deliberate inaction. Coping responses that imply action and initiative from the student (e.g., managing the situation by actively seeking for help or by learning new ways to study) are more useful in the process of adaptation to university than the last response, which is for example when students procrastinate their study activities because they have no idea where to start or nd the content too di cult. In addition to the self factors, we will focus on students’ strategies to deal with the transition by looking at academic adjustment.
1.3 The transition in the Netherlands: Context and generalisability
Research into educational transitions is important because transitions entail risk due to the gap between the delivering and receiving institution. ese problems are prominent worldwide, as for example evidenced by the large amount of research in Australia focusing on the rst-year experience and the attention paid to college readiness in the United States. Moreover, rst-year dropout rates are high in many countries, for example about one third in the United States (National Student Clearinghouse, 2014) and one h in Australia (Hare, 2016). Research into transitions that looks at both secondary schools and universities may contribute to a decrease in these high dropout rates.
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