Page 161 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 6
the externally regulated secondary school environment and the freer college environment that expects substantial independence from students and covers more content more quickly. Finally, the fourth factor refers to key transition knowledge and skills, or information that students need to get into college and then navigate its environment. In particular, they need nancial knowledge, to understand the costs and nancial aid available; cultural knowledge, to recognize the prevalent norms and values in college; and procedural knowledge, to perceive how the admission process works. ese transitional skills are especially pertinent to a student’s choice of a degree programme.
We chose to use Conley’s model as an overview of university readiness, because in contrast to theories of student success in higher education such as the ones by Tinto (1993) and Astin (1999), or overviews of important correlates of student success such as those by Richardson et al. (2012) and Robbins et al. (2004), this model focuses explicitly on what is needed before a student makes the transition. Related to this, unlike these other models or overviews, Conley’s model includes transition knowledge and skills, which students need to make an adequate choice of what degree programme they are going to pursue. is aspect is crucial, because in the Netherlands, many students switch programmes because they have chosen a programme they are not satis ed with (Inspectie van het Onderwijs, 2017). By switching programmes, a student usually loses a year. us, we apply this framework of college readiness to investigate which factors secondary school teachers in the Netherlands believe are important for their students to be a successful in university, leading to the rst research question:
1. What are teachers’ beliefs about aspects of university readiness?
6.2.2 Teachers’ university preparation practices
Little research focuses speci cally on how teachers prepare students for postsecondary education (McPhail, 2015), though some research suggests that secondary school teachers play a role. Smith and Zhang (2008) reported that students rated secondary school teachers more helpful than counsellors in preparing them for postsecondary education, which could be a result of the many students that each counsellor advises and the little time for each student. Another reason may be that the counsellors do not know the students as well as the teachers do. Moreover, in a qualitative study, Reid and Moore (2008) found that rst-generation urban college students indicated that teachers helped them prepare academically for college and served as trusted sources of information.
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