Page 171 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 6
thinks past the examinations” (T36, biology teacher). Furthermore, many teachers cited the in uence of the Inspectorate of Education, which keeps track of schools’ graduation rates and students’ grades on the nal examinations, then makes these data publicly available. Schools are accountable for their examination results, but not for how students fare in higher education, so as Dutch teacher T15 says: “ e examination requirements always hold priority. Bad results will be hold against us. So, we do focus on them a lot.” Also the curricula are tied to the examination requirements, such that teachers have little room for ‘extras’, but “If I would have more time, I could do a lot more. But you always have the issue of having to nish the programme. It really has to be nished in six years. So, there’s not much time for other things then” (T50, chemistry teacher).
In a related nding, 38 per cent of teachers mentioned a lack of time in general as an obstacle to university preparation, as Dutch teacher T4 explained: “Well, our lessons are 45 minutes, which means that if you really want to gure something out, or go into depth, you don’t have the time for it, because the lessons are too short. I miss that sometimes. Sometimes I think the learning content is very random, while I think that if you want to prepare those children well for university, you need deepening and analysis and whatever, and you need time to achieve that.”
A third obstacle, mentioned by more than one third of the teachers, was that they did not know what the universities expected, as Dutch teacher T14 indicated: “But look, if the university would say ‘hey guys, we miss this or that’, then we could see if we could o er that. At the moment I don’t know if that is the case, if I have to change something.” Biology teacher T47 shared this doubt and gave an example: “I thought maybe I have to do certain things di erently, or pay more explicit attention to some things, but I also think like ‘well, what do they \[university\] expect from me?’ So in that sense, yeah, I don’t know if it is important to pay more attention to research, because that is more now \[in university\] than it used to be. What would the university like? I think that is a question that needs to be asked.”
Many teachers a rmed that they had speci c wishes regarding university preparation. By far the most frequent wish was more coordination and collaboration with universities, which related directly to the perceived obstacle of not knowing what universities expect.
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