Page 211 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 8
behavioural, cognitive, and intellectual – did even better in university than the most curious students (those with top scores on intellectual engagement). is is in line with the ndings from our review on rst-year student success (Chapter 3), where we saw that various variables indicating behavioural engagement in university (e.g., class attendance, self-study time, regular study behaviour, and completion of assignments) impacted university GPA, number of obtained credits, and persistence to the second year. It seems then, that factors related to curiosity and academic interest motivate students for university studies, make them t into the university environment, and lead to con dence in their ability to make a success of their university years because they believe in their own intellectual capacities. However, it also seems that factors related to actual behaviour, i.e., behavioural and cognitive engagement, are more important in predicting students’ achievement and overall adjustment to university. Chapter 7 even showed that – despite much research that shows otherwise – the motivational factor self-e cacy did not a ect achievement or adjustment. e main contributor to academic adjustment was self-regulated study behaviour, again an indicator of behavioural and cognitive engagement. Consequently, the main point is that it is de nitely important that students who make the transition to university are curious and motivated and that they believe they can be successful in university, but that they may not come very far unless they also turn that motivation and that self-e cacy into actual self-regulated study behaviour.
e importance of this combination of types of engagement – behavioural and cognitive on the one hand and intellectual on the other – for student success at university is nicely captured in the construct of academic adjustment as operationalised by Baker and Siryk (1989). According to them, academic adjustment consists of four factors: motivation, application, performance, and environment. Motivation and environment, which refer to being motivated to take on academic work and feeling at home in the university environment, mainly relate to intellectual engagement. Application and performance, which refer to putting in the e ort to carry out study tasks and perform successfully, can be seen as behavioural and cognitive engagement. In Chapter 5, we saw that the overall academic adjustment score had a large impact on rst-year performance, but that students scored di erently on these four factors. Besides the types that scored low, average, or high on all engagement factors, there was the secondary school student type that is curious but neither puts/needs to put a lot of e ort into schoolwork nor uses/needs to use many learning strategies, as well as the type that works
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