Page 27 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 1
paragraph can be perceived as aspects of cognitive engagement (Fredricks et al., 2004). A ective engagement relates to a sense of belonging (Landis & Reschly, 2013) and is o en measured by looking at a student’s perceptions of his or her relationships with teachers and peers. A ective engagement will not be discussed in this thesis, but in Chapter 5 we do add another aspect of engagement, namely intellectual engagement. Intellectual engagement is de ned as an individual’s attraction to tasks that are intellectually demanding (Ackerman, Kanfer, & Go , 1995). For students studying at the highest level, and who will likely take on essential positions in academia and society later in life, this seems to be a relevant type of engagement. Need for cognition and academic interest can be seen as part of it. Research has shown positive relationships between engagement factors and achievement (Klem & Connell, 2004) and self-e cacy (Linnenbrink & Pintrich, 2003). Here, we ask the question if engagement contributes to university readiness, and if so, which engagement types matter the most.
Out-of-school academic activities (Chapter 4)
Students may be high in need for cognition and academic interest, but does this also translate to the corresponding behaviour? is can be captured by measuring students’ out-of-school academic activities, i.e., informal academic activities they pursue on their own initiative in their spare time. ese activities may involve reading about research in the newspaper or on websites, talking to friends and family about academic knowledge, or watching research-based documentaries. Secondary school students who already do this, even though no one requires them to do so, may be particularly suitable for university, as they already actively seek for the university-type of knowledge. PISA studies have investigated science-related out-of-school academic activities. eir 2006 results showed that, worldwide, not many secondary school students were engaged in out-of-school science activities: e highest percentages of engaged students were around 20%, for the items “Watch TV programmes about science” and “Read science magazines or science articles in newspapers” (OECD, 2007). Students who visited websites or read books about science topics were rare. e PISA 2015 survey asked parents how o en their children were engaged in science-related activities when they were ten years old. Again, watching science programmes on TV was the most popular activity, engaged in by 22% (OECD, 2017). Said PISA results showed that students engaging in science-related activities at age ten were about 1.7 times as likely to enjoy science and 1.6 times as likely to have high science self-e cacy at
26