Page 213 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 8
8.2 Discussion
In this paragraph, we will discuss a selection of results that call for further elaboration or that raised interesting questions or dilemmas: the role of self- e cacy in university readiness; the impact of science versus humanities and social sciences secondary school coursework on success in university; and the transition dilemma: Should the transition be made easier or is it a ‘healthy change’ that students just need to deal with?
8.2.1 The role of self-e cacy in university readiness
Since self-e cacy is known to be one of the most important predictors of academic success in post-secondary education (e.g., Honicke & Broadbent, 2016; Robbins et al., 2012), in Chapter 4, we looked at factors that would contribute to secondary school students’ self-e cacy in university success. Following from this, our line of thought in this chapter was that students with high levels of self-e cacy beliefs at the end of secondary school would be more likely to have a successful transition to university and to achieve better in the rst year. However, as we showed in Chapter 7 in our study among rst-year university students, our structural equation model lacked a signi cant relationship between academic self-e cacy and academic success: Self-e cacy was not related to university GPA, nor to the number of obtained credits, or the intention to persist into the second year. is was not surprising, as we found in the model that all behavioural and motivational factors were only related to these success outcomes through academic adjustment. However, whereas the other factors included in the model – self-regulated study behaviour, intrinsic motivation, and degree programme satisfaction – were signi cantly related to academic adjustment, self-e cacy was not. On rst sight, these non-signi cant results surrounding self-e cacy may render our research in Chapter 4 useless, which is why these ndings call for more elaboration. First, we will discuss the most likely reason for the insigni cant results in Chapter 7. Second, building on this reason and drawing from other research, we will argue why self-e cacy should still be considered a main concept in the transition, and thus also in the preparation phase during secondary school.
A very probable reason for the absence of a link between self-e cacy and the outcome measures in our model in Chapter 7 relates to the presence of a mediating factor: self-regulated study behaviour, or short, self-regulation. Self- e cacy was strongly related to self-regulation, and, in its turn, self-regulation was
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