Page 215 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 8
start their university studies is because research points to the e ect self-e cacy exerts on students’ coping strategies. Chemers, Hu, and Garcia (2001) showed that academic self-e cacy a ected students’ coping perceptions (i.e., whether they evaluated a situation as a challenge or as a threat), which in turn were related to a number of positive outcomes: Students with high self-e cacy beliefs were more likely to see the transition to university as a challenge instead of a threat, which reduced their experience of stress and increased their performance, their adjustment to university, and their satisfaction with university life.
ese are powerful reasons why academic self-e cacy should be seen as a crucial asset when embarking on the transition from secondary education to university and why the knowledge we gained in Chapter 4 on which factors in uence self-e cacy in secondary school is valuable. It would thus be worthwhile for secondary school teachers and counselors to help their students develop high self-e cacy beliefs. In paragraph 8.5.1 we suggest ways to enhance self-e cacy in secondary school students.
8.2.2 Does science coursework o er a better preparation for university than humanities and social sciences coursework?
In some studies in this thesis, we reported interesting ndings regarding the relationship between a student’s secondary school coursework and characteristics related to university readiness and success. An understanding of the context is vital here, so before we discuss these ndings we will brie y explain how the Dutch secondary school curriculum in pre-university education is designed. A er that, we will dig into two issues that arose from our results, namely that science students performed better in university than humanities/social sciences students and that they also consistently scored higher on measures of intellectual engagement.
In the rst three grades of pre-university education, grades 7 to 9, all students take up the same coursework. At the end of grade 9 (around the age of 15), students have to choose their coursework for the three upper grades of secondary school. ere are four tracks – a track being de ned as a group of closely related subjects that aims to o er “general social preparation and personal development, general preparation for higher education, and speci c preparation for higher education degree programmes in elds related to the school subjects” (Onderwijsraad, 2011, p. 12-13). ere are two science tracks (nature and technology, and nature and health) and two humanities/social sciences tracks (economics and society, and
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