Page 23 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 1
of academic adjustment by showing its relationship with student success (e.g., Kennedy, Sheckley, & Kehrhahn, 2000; McKenzie & Schweitzer, 2001; Rienties, Beausaert, Grohnert, Niemantsverdriet, & Kommers, 2012), but that it is not yet clear whether adjustment has di erential e ects depending on which outcome measure of success is used. Moreover, not many studies have investigated what factors in uence student’s academic adjustment.
Need for cognition (Chapters 4 and 5)
When you think about what a typical university student needs in order to be successful, a characteristic that quickly comes to mind is curiosity. Ideally, university students should be driven by a hunger for knowledge, since they would have to study theories, concepts, laws, etc. – large amounts of theoretical knowledge. People with a hands-on mentality, who like to directly apply knowledge and are not necessarily interested in how or why things work the way they do, may not t well in a university environment. is ‘eager for knowledge’ is nicely captured in the concept of need for cognition, which Cacioppo, Petty, Feinstein, and Jarvis (1996, p. 197) de ne as a personality variable that describes “an individual’s tendency to engage in and enjoy e ortful cognitive endeavours”. Cacioppo et al.’s (1996) detailed overview of research results regarding need for cognition con rms that this can be seen as a desirable or even indispensable attribute of a university student: Among other things, individuals high in need for cognition make sense of di cult information more easily; actively seek for information and think about and re ect on things more o en; hold a more positive attitude towards tasks that require problem solving and reasoning; and put more e ort into processing information. Research also showed that individuals high in need for cognition have more intrinsic motivation to learn (Amabile, Hill, Henessey, & Tighe, 1994); more frequently use deep learning strategies; have more adaptive control over their attention and cognition (Evans, Kirby, & Fabrigar, 2003); and obtain higher grades in both secondary and postsecondary education (Luong et al., 2017; Richardson et al., 2012). Luong et al. (2017) even suggested that the in uence of need for cognition on achievement grows over the school years. Furthermore, Grass, Strobel, and Strobel (2017) recently investigated the relevance of need for cognition for both performance and a ective measures of success in university. ey found that need for cognition was positively related to GPA and satisfaction with one’s studies, and negatively to termination thoughts (considering to quit studies) and suggested that research on need for cognition in postsecondary education would be intensi ed.
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