Page 21 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 1
1.5.1 Theories of student success in higher education
One in uential theory of student success in higher education is Astin’s (1999) theory of student involvement. is theory is built on an input-throughput-output model, where the input consists of a student’s background and previous experiences, the throughput is how the student experiences college, and the output involves the student’s characteristics a er he or she has graduated, e.g., knowledge and attitudes gained from the college experience. According to Astin, student involvement is vital to the college experience: Being continuously involved, i.e., investing cognitive energy, is related to academic performance. Many researchers have built on Astin’s theory and study student involvement as a main predictor of achievement in higher education, such as Kuh and Pike (e.g., Kuh, 2009; Kuh, Cruce, Shoup, Kinzie, & Gonyea, 2008; Pike & Kuh, 2005; Pike, Kuh, & Massa-McKinley, 2008). Nowadays, this work is mainly referred to as research about student engagement. A review by Pascarella and Terenzini (1991, p. 610) even concluded that “one of the most inescapable and unequivocal conclusions we can make is that the impact of college is largely determined by the individual’s quality of e ort and level of involvement in both academic and non-academic activities”. Following from this, the concept of engagement plays an important role in our studies.
A second important theory we draw on is Tinto’s (1975) theory of student attrition. e central idea in this theory is that attrition is related to a student’s academic and social integration, which in turn in uence and are being in uenced by the level of goal commitment and institutional commitment. Moreover, a student’s characteristics (e.g., individual attributes, prior education, demographic characteristics) and characteristics of the institution (e.g., features of the learning environment) have an impact on goal commitment and institutional commitment. is is a continual process; a student’s level of commitment is subject to change during the time he or she is in college. Tinto’s theory remains in uential in higher education research, especially in research about psychosocial processes in higher education (e.g., Clark, Middleton, Nguyen, & Zwick, 2014; Collings, Swanson, & Watkins, 2014; Dika & D’Amico, 2016), although not all relationships postulated in the model are backed by empirical evidence and the model as a whole has been criticised (Brunsden, Davies, Shevlin, & Bracken, 2000). With its focus on integration, Tinto’s theory is particularly useful for studying the transition from secondary school to university. In this thesis, our conceptualisation of academic adjustment, which receives attention in several of our studies, relates to Tinto’s concept of academic integration.
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