Page 207 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 8
behavioural engagement (behavioural engagement and self-e cacy in putting in the e ort needed to study e ectively) and cognitive engagement (the use of learning strategies such as self-regulation). Students doing science coursework were overrepresented in the group of intellectually engaged students and those doing humanities/social sciences coursework were overrepresented in the group of intellectually highly disengaged students.
One year later, in the rst semester at university, the pattern that emerged was that the overall highly engaged students were clearly doing best: ey had the highest GPA, obtained the most credits, and scored highest on all four academic adjustment aspects (motivation, application, performance, and environment). Intellectually highly disengaged learners had the lowest GPA, obtained the least credits, and experienced the greatest di culties with the adjustment aspect performance (exerting su cient and e cient e orts). Behaviourally and cognitively disengaged students scored lowest on overall adjustment, as well as on all adjustment aspects except performance. e di erences between these two worst-performing groups and the overall highly engaged group were signi cant on credit obtainment, overall academic adjustment, and the adjustment aspect performance.
e students with an overall average engagement as well as the intellectually engaged students were both doing reasonably well at university, although we found some small di erences between these two groups: On the adjustment aspects application (applying yourself to academic work) and performance (exerting academic e orts that are su cient and e cient), the students with overall average engagement scored higher than the intellectually engaged, whereas the latter group showed higher scores on motivation (motivation to do academic work) and environment (satisfaction with the academic environment). ese di erences point towards the existence of clear di erences in types of engagement, but also to a certain stability in the level of these di erent types: e students who were curious, interested, and con dent of their intellectual abilities during secondary school were adjusted to university one year later mainly in the sense that they were motivated to be involved in academic work and happy to be in a university environment. On the other hand, the hard-working secondary school students, who were more con dent in their ability to put in a lot of e ort into their studies than con dent in their intellectual capacities, were adjusted to university mainly in the sense that they applied themselves to academic work and exerted su cient e ort.
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