Page 226 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

crucial, as its ndings may point to serious problems in the design of the tracks in Dutch secondary education.
Furthermore, other learning environment characteristics in secondary education seem to play a role in university preparation, such as the amount of indepencence that students are given. Our study of secondary school teachers’ beliefs and practices regarding university practices revealed that some teachers thought that if they did things in ways that resemble the university environment this would contribute to students’ readiness. An example is that some secondary schools have been experimenting with school hours – supervised or unsupervised – during which students have to stay in school but can decide for themselves what they want to work on. As this resembles the increased level of freedom students will enjoy in the university learning environment, it would be worthwhile investigating whether these hours actually contribute to students’ ability to work independently, to their development of self-regulated study behaviour, and to their self-e cacy in being successful in university.
Another interesting aspect of the learning environment to be investigated would be the extent to which the curriculum is focused on the nal examinations. In our teacher study, the examinations were brought forward by many teachers as an obstacle that took away time that could be spent on university preparation – a notion also present in the literature (e.g., Friedrichsen, 2002; Marland, 2003). Does a curriculum with a high nal examinations focus prepare students less well for university than a curriculum that is less focused on teaching to the nal test? Such a study would provide policy and practice with useful input on the debate regarding the value of the examinations in the light of university preparation.
8.4.3 More qualitative research and more perspectives 8 In this thesis we gave a voice to secondary school teachers, but not to secondary
school students: Regarding the latter, we only gathered quantitative data through questionnaires. Consequently, we know what teachers see as important aspects of
university readiness and we have an idea of how they try to contribute to university readiness in their daily teaching, but we are still in the dark as to how students perceive the upcoming transition. From research, we know that many students have unrealistic expectations, but what exactly do these expectations comprise? We also know that many university students nd the transition di cult, but does this mean that these students dread the transition beforehand or that they encounter the di culties only a erwards when they realise that their (maybe
Conclusion and discussion
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