Page 228 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

beforehand and also, if they are informed about the actual gaps between rst- year lecturers’ expectations and the reality of actual freshmen’s baggage. Of course, knowing what lecturers expect from new students will also be valuable information for prospective students, as it will help them form expectations about studying at university and may help them in their study choice.
8.5 Implications
In this section we draw on the ve studies in this thesis as well as on previous research to give suggestions to secondary schools on how they can help their students get (more) ready for university. Although there is much more to say about this, we will focus on four themes: improving secondary school students’ self- regulation; improving university preparation in the humanities and social sciences secondary school tracks; collaboration between schools and universities; and increasing the number of university-educated teachers in pre-university education.
8.5.1 Improving self-regulation
e biggest contributor to students’ academic adjustment in the rst year of
university was students’ self-regulatory study behaviour (Chapter 7). Self-
regulated learning refers to being able to understand and control your learning
environment by means of setting goals, selecting strategies to achieve these goals,
use these strategies, and monitor your behaviour and performance with these goals
in mind (Schunk, 1996). We saw that students who were more capable of self-
regulation adjusted signi cantly and substantially more e ectively to university
than those with weaker self-regulation skills, in line with the literature that points 8 out that students higher in self-regulation skills learn better (e.g., Pintrich, 2000).
It is important that students already possess these skills when they graduate from secondary school, as they are expected to by university because the skills are hardly ever explicitly taught there within the regular curriculum. Moreover, the literature showed that preparation regarding time management and study skills contributes to students’ e ective study behaviour in university (e.g., Jansen & Suhre, 2010).
The development of self-regulation
How does self-regulated learning develop? Following self-regulated learning theory, grounded in social-cognitive theory (Bandura, 1997), there are four phases
Conclusion and discussion
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