Page 169 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 6
they have to study for a test, I tell them: ‘ is is to prepare you for how you have to do it later \[in university\]’. And I also tell them that for a test in university I sometimes had to study ve books.”
Teacher behaviours to promote students’ independence, as performed by 42 per cent of them, typically were described as follows: “In grade 12, I don’t take them by the hand anymore regarding the subject matter. I do tell them in a timely manner what they have to study, but I’m not going to check it in between. Sometimes this means that they have to study three chapters for one test, and I do not o er these chapters in bite-sized parts anymore” (T24, English teacher).
Finally, the last practice mentioned o en enough to appear as a theme (15%) was paying attention to the development of students’ language skills, which usually related to requirements that university students would need to read, write, and present in Dutch and English. us, “In grade 10 we have them write a research paper now which has to be linked to their coursework, so that they get acquainted with the vocabulary of the discipline they may study in university, because at university much is in English” (T13, English teacher). Training students in language skills represented the practice that exhibited the largest di erence across disciplines: Half of the humanities teachers paid attention to language skills, but only six per cent of science and none of the social sciences teachers did so.
6.4.3 Teachers’ beliefs about their role in university preparation
Table 6.4 outlines four themes that emerged regarding role perceptions. When teachers indicated if they considered preparing students for university as part of their role, two-thirds of our respondents agreed, with comments such as “I also tell the students: ‘I have a responsibility towards you guys to prepare you for what’s next’” (T20, physics and chemistry teacher) or “Of course that is a part of the job, you want to deliver them well” (T19, physics and mathematics teacher). e most common elaboration by teachers who did not regard university preparation as part of their job was a belief that by preparing students for the nal examinations, they automatically were preparing them for university education (mentioned by 26% of respondents). As French teacher T28 put it: “My responsibility is mainly to make sure they start the nal examinations well-prepared and these examinations are preparatory for university education, so that’s it.” Comparably, mathematics teacher T38 said: “Our job is to deliver a good secondary school student, not a good university student.” In contrast, 22 per cent of teachers not only considered university preparation part of their task but explicitly mentioned that it entailed
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