Page 197 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 7
claim about student involvement can be applied to academic adjustment as well: “It is not so much what the individual thinks or feels, but what the individual does, how he or she behaves” (Astin, 1999, p. 519). Furthermore, the di erences in magnitude of in uence on adjustment could be attributable to smaller di erences between students in academic motivation than in self-regulated study behaviour.
A surprising result was that academic self-e cacy, widely accepted as a very important correlate of student success (e.g., Robbins et al., 2004), did not a ect any of the student success outcomes of our study, nor did it a ect academic adjustment. Its most important role in the model was as an in uential correlate of self-regulated study behaviour, consistent with previous research indicating high correlations between self-regulation and self-e cacy (Bou ard-Bouchard et al., 1991; Fenollar et al., 2007). Again, a possible explanation is that behavioural factors are more important in in uencing adjustment than motivational factors such as self-e cacy and that the di erences between students in self-e cacy were rather small. Two other explanations are provided by De Clercq et al. (2017), who found a relationship between self-e cacy and achievement that was less strong than expected in their person-centered study on rst-year achievement. As they explained, global self-e cacy, such as the general measure of academic self- e cacy that we used in this study, is not as good a predictor as domain-speci c self-e cacy, e.g., self-e cacy in a speci c subject or a speci c skill, and self- e cacy beliefs are not good predictors of achievement in new learning contexts, such as the rst year at university (De Clercq et al., 2017). However, we did nd that students who were more con dent in their academic skills tended to regulate their e ort and manage their study time and environment more e ectively than students lower in self-e cacy. Because self-regulated study behaviour is very important in university – where instructors provide little control or structure and more autonomy and responsibility is demanded of students (Pintrich, 2004) – self- e cacy is still an important factor in the transition from secondary to university education due to its in uence on behaviour regulation.
Contrary to our expectation, only one variable in uenced students’ intention to persist, namely, the level of satisfaction with their chosen degree programme. Although this satisfaction also in uenced academic adjustment, academic adjustment did not have any in uence on intention to persist. us, whether a student planned to continue his or her studies a er the rst year was not related to how well the student could cope with the demands of the academic environment in general, but rather to how well he or she tted within the speci c
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