Page 199 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 7
enjoy learning relationships with others, and feel they are able to reach their own goals. ese actions could be a meaningful starting point to increase motivation.
Whereas self-regulation skills and motivation can be positively in uenced when the student is already in university, this is to a lesser extent the case with students’ satisfaction with their chosen programme. ere is not much that can be done when the student has simply chosen a programme that is not what he or she expected it to be and thus does not match his or her abilities, interests, and values. Switching programmes then is a good solution. Because of this large in uence we found of satisfaction with the programme on persistence (which is in line with a study by Jansen and Suhre (2010)), it is worthwhile to help prospective students make a good programme choice. Both secondary schools and universities play important roles in this regard. Secondary schools could provide students with the opportunity to get to know the programmes in which they are interested – for example, by having them write a comparative essay of three study programmes, which would encourage them to go in depth to investigate the study programmes and the extent to which they t the students’ individual strengths, interests, values, and learner characteristics. Universities could provide information for prospective students in such a way that their expectations of a programme will be realistic. Information should be transparent about crucial characteristics of the study, such as the curriculum, the degree of di culty, the level of guidance and availability of sta , the available facilities of the university, and so on.
Last, since both universities and secondary schools are important parties in the transition, it would be bene cial if they would communicate and collaborate more. Schools can prepare students better if they know what happens in the rst year at university. First-year lecturers gain understanding of what they can reasonably expect from new students if they know what happens in the upper grades of secondary education.
7.5.3 Limitations and directions for future research
A rst limitation of the current study was that we only accounted for academic adjustment, not for other types of adjustment. Although it is the most consistent correlate of achievement compared with the other types (Rienties et al., 2012), measuring social, personal-emotional, and institutional adjustment in addition could be valuable. Second, there were some limitations regarding the sample: It was a convenience sample that consisted of students from several universities and degree programmes without taking these di erences into account.
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