Page 218 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

to so sciences, ranging from engineering, medicine, and physics (most di cult to understand) to history, geography, and sociology (easiest to understand) (Hernandez, 2016). us, students may choose a humanities/social sciences track due to their perceived easiness. Besides that these tracks in secondary school are perceived as less rigorous, there is also the bigger, and quite controversial, issue of the value of the humanities and social sciences: As higher education is costly and unemployment is relatively larger in humanities and social sciences elds than in STEM elds (Carnevale, Cheah, & Strohl, 2013; VSNU, 2016), people question their value. e fact that one can access a language degree at university without having taken that language at secondary school, study history or economics without even having graduated in those subjects, and study social sciences subjects without any speci c requirements as to secondary school coursework: ey all con rm the poor image of the humanities and social sciences tracks as not very valuable, and thus make them an unattractive choice.
Another aspect that may play a role in the better performance in many
university degree programmes of students who took science coursework in
secondary school is the fact that humanities and social sciences subjects in
secondary school are not closely related to many humanities and social sciences
degrees in university. In other words, these degrees in university are relatively new
for everyone, so students who took up humanities/social sciences coursework in
secondary school are not at an advantage. Examples are social sciences degree
programmes such as psychology and sociology, which do not have secondary
school counterparts, and humanities programmes such as languages and cultures
that either cannot be studied in secondary school or have a di erent focus in
secondary school (e.g., a relatively high focus on reading, writing, and speaking
skills and not so much on linguistics, semantics, literature, etc.). 8
Fourth, it could be that students in science tracks develop certain skills to a higher extent than humanities/social sciences students – skills that allow them to cope more e ectively with the demands posed in higher education (Fonteyne et al., 2015). Scrutinising di cult science concepts, performing precise calculations, solving equations, and applying scienti c thinking – typical skills acquired during science classes – could lead to the development of better analytical skills, more scienti c literacy, and more perseverance, which can be bene cial in every university degree. Moreover, our interview data showed that science teachers in secondary school paid more attention than teachers in other elds to the development of research skills, an attitude of inquiry, and perseverance and self-
Conclusion and discussion
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