Page 237 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 8
adapted primary literature in secondary school showed that it increased students’ understanding of the nature of academic research in a speci c eld, made them ask more higher-order questions, and increased their engagement and inquiry- based thinking (Brill & Yarden, 2003; Baram-Tsabari & Yarden, 2005). Adapted primary literature may thus broaden students’ image of the humanities and social sciences as academic elds.
Apart from that, it would be good to have a clear image of which skills and abilities are of vital importance in speci c humanities and social sciences university degree programmes and to provide this knowledge to secondary schools, so that they can take action if necessary and possible. e most notable example is the importance of mathematics for being successful in a rst-year economics degree in university. As Arnold and Straten (2012) showed, mathematics skills were a key factor in explaining why students who completed the nature and health or nature and technology track, which includes more advanced mathematics, performed better than students who took the economics and society track. Findings like these should be taken very seriously and at least lead to an investigation on whether the curriculum should and could be re-organised in such a way that students in the economics and society track can take advanced mathematics. A related issue is the importance of statistics for academic success in the social sciences (e.g., Fonteyne et al., 2015), which makes it important to embed a substantial amount of statistics in the type of mathematics that is part of the culture and society track.
A nal issue is the problem that many humanities and social sciences degree programmes do not have a secondary school counterpart and do not even make an appearance as a topic in secondary school subjects, as opposed to many degree programmes in the natural sciences that revolve around topics that students explore at some point during secondary school physics, chemistry, or biology. Cultural antropology, psychology, sociology, law, communication – these are just a few examples of academic elds that are as new for humanities and social sciences students as they are for science students. is is not only detrimental because it implies a gap between secondary school and university and contributes to the perception of humanities and social sciences coursework in secondary school as being useless (e.g., students may not see the use of a foreign language, geography, and arts when they intend to pursue a law degree), but also because students will not get familiar with these elds unless they encounter them in their own social environment or during their search for information as part of the study choice process. Not having a clear idea of the content of a eld increases the
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