Page 306 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

most) sentences are comprehensible and readable instead of only serving the function of giving the very small number of people who actually read this thing huge headaches thanks to my a nity with complex sentence structures and using redundant words, and my tendency to include at least ve commas, two dashes, six brackets (mainly containing useless information), and one unnecessary colon into one sentence. Furthermore, I am also grateful for your insights as a former secondary school teacher. It’s reassuring that the things I bring up in my thesis also resonate with the people in the eld.
Talking about the eld, I am extremely thankful that there were 16 schools that participated in this research at some point (either in the pilot or in the large- scale data collection). It was a lot to ask to have the upper-grade students complete my questionnaires in one or even two school hours, which made some of these adolescents quite cranky, so at least I hope that the schools found the reports about the results informative and helpful. In addition, even though none of them will read this so this makes absolutely no sense, I’d like to thank the more than 2,000 students from grades 10, 11, 12, and the rst year of university who completed the questionnaires. Last but not least, I thank the pre-university teachers who let me interview them about their ideas and practices regarding university preparation. Without all of your time and input, this research would not have been possible.
Vincent and Dorien from the University of Antwerp, and Jasperina from our university, thank you very much for collaborating with me on the systematic review of predictors of academic success in Dutch and Flemish higher education (a.k.a. Chapter 3). I know it ended up being a much bigger project than we imagined and I am thankful that you were all committed until the end.
Last in this part, I’d like to express my gratitude to the members of the assessment committee, Adriaan Hofman, Klaas van Veen, and Sabine Severiens, for taking the time to read my thesis and also for taking part in the examining committee of my defence.
Mensen die ik al lang ken en die me wonderbaarlijk genoeg nog steeds niet zat zijn
Constante factoren zijn niet alleen cruciaal in onderzoek, maar ook in het leven. De afgelopen dertien jaar ben ik naar Groningen verhuisd, terug naar Brabant, naar Leeuwarden, naar Nijmegen, en weer terug naar Groningen. Het behouden van stabiele sociale contacten in zo’n veranderlijke woonsituatie is uitdagend, en onvermijdelijkerwijs you win some and you lose some. Daarom ben ik bijzonder
AIV
Acknowledgements
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