Page 221 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 8
Second, due to the di erentiated secondary education system in the Netherlands and the access requirements in higher education, all those who enter university are expected to possess the cognitive capacities for university study and should therefore – in theory – be able to succeed. Hence, all the other aspects such as self-regulation, self-e cacy, interest, and engagement a ect the chance of success in actual practice, as we have already seen in the studies in this thesis. In contrast to intelligence, these things can be in uenced by educational practices in secondary school and in that way students can be prepared for success in university. Also, in contrast to the notion of survival of the ttest, everyone should be given a fair chance of success, even the ones who might not survive on their own if you threw them in at the deep end.
ird, we saw that a very important cause of dropping out lies in an inadequate choice of degree programme and having unrealistic expectations of university. Inadequate choices will be made over and over again, and unrealistic expectations will be harboured if not enough attention is paid in order to ensure a smooth transition during the nal year of secondary education – e.g., information provision and expectation management.
To conclude, in order to prevent unnecessary problems in the transition, such as too much stress and students’ expectations not being met, measures in the form of better preparation at secondary school and more collaboration between schools and universities to make the transition somewhat easier are welcome. Suggestions for such measures will be o ered in paragraph 8.5.
8.3 Limitations
is thesis reports some new insights regarding the transition from secondary education to university, but there are a number of limitations that should be taken into account when interpreting the ndings.
First, we used longitudinal data in only one of the studies, Chapter 5, where students’ engagement during secondary school was related to adjustment and achievement in university. All other studies focused either on secondary school students (Chapter 4) or teachers (Chapter 6) or on rst-year university students (Chapters 3 and 7). Furthermore, in our longitudinal study, only a relatively small number of university students participated in the data collection and there were some indications that better performing students were overrepresented in
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