Page 210 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

study behaviour, degree programme satisfaction, and academic motivation. Academic self-e cacy did not a ect academic adjustment; its most important role in the model was as a strong correlate with self-regulated study behaviour. Academic adjustment was related to both GPA and credits. Its e ect on GPA was even stronger than the e ect of secondary school GPA. None of the motivational and behavioural factors was directly connected to GPA or credits; they only a ected these outcomes through academic adjustment. Degree programme satisfaction was the only predictor of intention to persist – academic adjustment did not in uence this outcome measure.
is study thus con rmed the importance of academic adjustment in predicting students’ achievement in the rst semester of university, but not in predicting students’ intention to stay in the programme. Furthermore, we learned that students who 1) were better at regulating their own study behaviour; 2) were more satis ed with the degree programme; and 3) were more motivated to gain academic knowledge and to do research, adjusted better to the new university learning environment. Hence, we can say that these students very likely experienced a successful transition from secondary school to university.
8.1.6 Integrative overview of the main ndings
In this paragraph, the two research questions of this thesis will be answered.
Research question 1: What student characteristics contribute to e ectively
bridging the gap between secondary and university education and to success
in the rst year at university?
Considering the combined ndings from the di erent studies in this thesis,
we see that many factors play a role in the transition. However, their roles vary 8 depending on the outcome variable and the stage the student is in (secondary
education or university), which makes for a complex picture. Chapters 4 and 5 showed that having a high need for cognition and much academic interest were related to 1) high self-e cacy in being successful at university; 2) motivation for academic work; and 3) feeling at home in the university environment. Whereas Chapter 4 showed that behavioural engagement did not a ect students’ academic self-e cacy before the transition, Chapter 5 pointed out that students with high behavioural as well as high cognitive engagement achieved better at university than students with lower behavioural and cognitive engagement. Additionally, the students who scored high on all types of engagement in secondary school –
Conclusion and discussion
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