Page 183 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 7
whether a student is passing courses. Persistence is yet another distinct measure of success, in that students with a high GPA and many credits may drop out, whereas students with a low GPA or few credits may choose to persist. e di erences in measures of success makes it important to include all of them and investigate whether academic adjustment a ects them di erently.
e motivational and behavioural input variables on which we focus appear in prior literature as important correlates of student success and academic adjustment in university and will be discussed below.
7.2 Theoretical framework
7.2.1 Academic adjustment in uencing student success
Research on student success in higher education has a rich history. e traditional theories of Tinto (1993) and Astin (1999) focus on the interaction between the student and the institution, where Tinto’s theory of student attrition includes academic, social, and institutional integration as well as goal commitment and Astin’s student development theory revolves around student involvement, which he de nes as the energy that a student devotes to the academic experience (Astin, 1999). e common ground lies therein that a student enters higher education with certain personal characteristics, e.g., personality, motivation, and study skills, which change and may even be challenged in interaction with the new educational environment. Successful interaction with this new environment, such as having positive interactions with lecturers and fellow students and being able to handle the increased complexity and quantity of the learning content, then determines whether or not a student is satis ed with the rst-year experience and whether he or she obtains good grades, passes his or her courses, and persists to the second year (Astin, 1999; Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005; Sevinç & Gizir, 2014). Successful interaction between a rst-year student and the academic characteristics and demands of the university environment can be summarised by the construct of academic adjustment. Prior literature consistently showed the pivotal role of academic adjustment in predicting achievement (Aspelmeier, Love, McGill, Elliott, & Pierce, 2012; Rienties et al., 2012; Wintre et al., 2011) and persistence (Kennedy et al., 2000; Kuh et al., 2006) in higher education. Some studies even reported that the e ects of background variables on achievement were indirect, with adjustment as a mediator (Kamphorst et al., 2012; Petersen
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