Page 206 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

than actual behaviour in secondary school (behavioural engagement). Moreover, the in uence of background factors should be kept in mind, as this implies that certain students – in particular female students without university-educated parents and taking humanities/social sciences coursework – may have a relatively low need for cognition, academic interest, and may hardly be involved in academic activities outside of school. Consequently, they may have low self-e cacy in being successful at university, which may make the transition to university challenging for them.
8.1.3Chapter 5: The relationship between secondary school students’ engagement pro les and the transition to university
As we concluded in the review (Chapter 3), not much research connects students’ characteristics in secondary school to outcomes that matter in university. Student engagement is an important predictor of educational outcomes, both in secondary and postsecondary education. Academic adjustment is an important predictor of success in university as well as a useful measure of how well a student has made the transition from secondary school to university. In this study, we identi ed pro les of grade 12 secondary school students based on three dimensions of engagement – behavioural, cognitive, and intellectual – and investigated how these pro les di ered in academic adjustment and achievement in university one year later. e research questions were:
1. Which student pro les emerge in the nal grade of secondary school from the indicators of behavioural, cognitive, and intellectual engagement?
2. How do these groups di er one year later in their academic
adjustment and achievement in university? 8
Latent pro le analysis using nine indicators – two measures of behavioural engagement, four of cognitive engagement, and three of intellectual engagement – revealed the existence of ve distinguishable pro les of grade 12 secondary school students: intellectually highly disengaged (7%); behaviourally and cognitively disengaged (14%); students with overall average engagement (36%); intellectually engaged (22%); and overall highly engaged students (21%). Male students were overrepresented in the behaviourally and cognitively disengaged and in the intellectually engaged pro les, i.e., in the groups in which students’ intellectual engagement (need for cognition, academic interest, and self-e cacy in being able to understand university-level content) was higher than their
Conclusion and discussion
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