Page 190 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Academic adjustment
We measured students’ academic adjustment with the academic adjustment subscale of the Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ) by Baker and Siryk (1984). is subscale consists of 24 questions that involve coping with the academic demands of the university experience. In line with Baker and Siryk’s internal consistency measures for the scale, which range from α = .82 to .87, and with more recent studies who used the academic adjustment subscale of the SACQ (e.g., Jones et al. (2015) and Rodríguez-González et al. (2012)), the alpha of this scale in our study was good: .85.
Motivational factors
Academic motivation. We used a measure of intrinsic academic motivation
speci cally focused on the university environment, i.e., a desire to gain academic
knowledge in one’s eld of interest and to conduct research because one nds it
inherently interesting or enjoyable (based on Ryan & Deci, 2000). e 13 items
were based on the Scienti c Attitude Inventory II (SAI II; Moore & Foy, 1997).
Academic self-e cacy. To measure academic self-e cacy for the university environment, we used 16 of the 33 items of the College Academic Self-E cacy
Scale (CASES; Owen & Froman, 1988). Previous research has shown that these
items were su cient to obtain a reliable measure of academic self-e cacy (Van
Rooij et al., 2017). e 16 items were typical behaviours that students need to
demonstrate at university, such as being able to understand di cult passages in
textbooks and attending class consistently even in a dull course. 7 Degree programme satisfaction. We measured the extent to which the university
students were satis ed with the degree programme they had chosen by averaging the score on two items: “I am satis ed with the programme I chose” and “Looking back, I wish I had chosen a di erent degree programme” (reverse coded).
Behavioural factor: self-regulated study behaviour
e self-regulated study behaviour scale consisted of the e ort regulation and the time and study environment management subscales of Part B of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) (Pintrich et al., 1993). e e ort regulation scale had four items, and the time and study environment management subscale consisted of eight items. Credé and Phillips’s (2011) meta-analyses of the MSLQ showed that the scales of time and study environment management and e ort regulation were so strongly correlated that they may assess the same
Academic adjustment in university
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