Page 166 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

6.4 Results
To present the results, we discuss the main themes that emerged from the data related to each research question: teachers’ beliefs about university readiness, their university preparation practices, beliefs about the teacher’s role in preparation, and possible barriers. We also brie y outline two other themes that arose from the data: teacher background factors and teacher knowledge that in uence teachers’ practices.
A point of interest was to nd links between teacher beliefs about readiness
and their preparation practices, so we combined the results for research questions 1
and 2 together in Table 6.3. e le -hand column summarises aspects of university
readiness most o en mentioned by teachers and the percentage of teachers who
mentioned it. e second column identi es the relevant key category of college
readiness according to Conley’s model, and then the third column reveals the
university preparation practice that corresponds to this readiness aspect, along
with what percentage of teachers indicated they attended to this aspect it in the
classroom. Finally, we highlighted the discrepancy between readiness aspects
and preparation practices, such that a negative symbol indicates fewer teachers
mentioned it as a practice than identi ed it as a readiness aspect. 6
6.4.1 Teachers’ beliefs about university readiness
e three aspects most o en mentioned as crucial to university readiness all belonged to Conley’s (2007) learning skills and techniques category. e most o en mentioned aspect was possessing study skills. Teachers o en talked about university students needing to be able to plan to master the vast amount of content required, without external regulation. A second notable aspect was independence, which they considered as both being able to live independently, a er moving out of their parents’ homes, and a capability to study independently. Perseverance emerged as another crucial aspect; the teachers described the learning content as more di cult than that in secondary school, and they recognised that students would have to pass courses that they would nd di cult or disliked. Furthermore, more than one third of the teachers mentioned curiosity, an adequate choice of study programme, content knowledge, and language skills as important readiness aspects. Curiosity constitutes a cognitive strategy in the college readiness framework, an adequate choice of programme re ects the transition knowledge and skills category, and the latter two aspects are forms of content knowledge.
Teachers’ beliefs and practices
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