Page 222 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

this sample. In order to make more solid claims about students’ experiences of the transition and relationships between characteristics present in secondary school students and university success, more longitudinal research using a large, representative sample is called for.
A second limitation, which is related to the rst one, is that many of our studies were correlational. In Chapters 4 and 7 we used path analysis and tested hypothesised linkages between factors, but in many cases it could be argued that the paths can be turned around. Examples are the path from academic interest towards self-e cacy (Chapter 4) and the path from degree programme satisfaction towards academic adjustment (Chapter 7). Longitudinal research would also be a solution to this problem.
ird, although throughout the thesis we have included many factors,
there are still important factors that remained out of our scope. is is due to
our strong focus on student characteristics, more speci cally motivational factors
and factors related to learning strategies. From our systematic review (Chapter
3), we know which factors that in uence rst-year success are missing in our
studies: the personality factors conscientiousness and procrastination; university
learning environment characteristics; factors related to the t between the
secondary school learning environment and the university learning environment;
and engagement factors in university such as attendance, self-study time, and
regular study behaviour. Adding these factors to our models would likely have
increased the amount of explained variance in university success and would thus
have provided us with a better picture on what really matters in the transition
to university. is is particularly the case for the learning environment variables.
We hardly included any of these, with the exception of the coursework a student
had taken in secondary school. As a consequence, our conclusions mainly focus 8 on individual student characteristics. Our claims about what kind of learning environments in secondary school would contribute to university readiness are
as such mostly based on assumptions. ese assumptions were about how certain
learning environments would or would not positively in uence certain student characteristics, instead of on research results showing that certain aspects of the
learning environment have either a positive or negative impact on university
readiness. e same limitation applies to the university learning environment.
Although our sample of university students was spread out over a number of
degree programmes, we did not take into account in which ways the learning environments in these programmes di ered from each other. is prevented us
Conclusion and discussion
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