Page 189 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij
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Chapter 7
7.3 Method
7.3.1 Sample
e total sample was a convenience sample that consisted of 243 rst-year university students from di erent research universities in the Netherlands, who completed the questionnaire approximately three months a er the start of their programme. Many di erent degree programmes were represented in the sample, but a large majority of the students were pursuing a social sciences degree (77%), e.g., spatial sciences, sociology, and law, and a smaller number of students were in the humanities (4%) and natural sciences (19%). Women were overrepresented in this study (60%, as opposed to 53% in the population of rst-year university students in the Netherlands; Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau \[SCP\], 2014). Most students started university a er graduating from pre-university education (82%); 14% came from higher vocational education, and the other 4% had switched from another programme at university. Students’ average age was 19.13 years (SD 1.57), ranging from 17 to 28 years, hence the sample can be seen as a sample of traditional students. is makes the sample representative, as in the Netherlands 80% of all pre-university students directly continue to university education (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek \[CBS\], 2016). Furthermore, 24% of students can be classi ed as rst-generation university students, students of whom neither of their parents had attended higher education. Among all rst-year university students in the Netherlands, the percentage of rst-generation students is 33% (Van den Broek et al., 2014).
7.3.2 Measures
Student success outcomes
GPA. Students indicated the average grade they obtained for the courses they had taken in the rst quarter of the study year. In the Dutch education system, grades range from 1 to 10, and a 5.5 or higher is required to pass. e students’ grades in this sample ranged from 4 to 9, with an average grade of 6.90 (SD = 0.98). Credits. In addition to their GPA, students reported the number of credits they had obtained in the rst quarter of the year.
Intention to persist. We measured students’ intention to persist with one question: “Do you intend to nish this degree programme (i.e., the 3-year university bachelor’s programme)?”
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