Page 31 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 1
two outcomes of success, whereas there are three outcomes that are worth looking at: grade point average, number of obtained credits, and continuing into the second year. So far, an overview of factors that in uence students’ success in Dutch and Flemish higher education has not yet been available and ndings of individual studies were scattered, e.g., researchers had investigated many di erent types of factors, focused on di erent populations, and used di erent outcome measures. We have tried to address these shortcomings and conducted a systematic review study in association with two colleagues in Antwerp. e aim was to obtain a comprehensive overview of factors that are important in explaining grade point average (GPA), number of obtained credits (EC), and persistence in the rst year of higher education (i.e., professional education and university education) in the Netherlands and Flanders. We searched several databases and screened more than 100 peer-reviewed papers on student success that were published a er 2000. In the end, 38 papers met our inclusion criteria. e ndings from these individual studies were sorted into nine categories: 1) ability; 2) demographic factors; 3) prior education; 4) personality; 5) motivation; 6) the learning environment; 7) psychosocial factors; 8) learning strategies; and 9) engagement. Consequently, each category contained information on whether or not and how its variables were related to GPA, EC, and/or persistence, which we describe in the results. Also, we discuss di erences between the Netherlands and Flanders and between professional and university education, and suggest directions for further research and ideas to advance the eld of higher education research in these two Dutch- speaking countries. is overview of factors that in uence a successful rst year provided the starting point for the other studies in this thesis: By knowing what makes students thrive in university we have better ideas of what may be important factors of university readiness.
1.7.2 Chapter 4: Factors that contribute to secondary school students’ self- e cacy in being a successful university student
International and Dutch research showed that academic self-e cacy is an important predictor of rst-year university students’ success. is makes it a key intended outcome of pre-university education, not only due to its proven connection with achievement and retention in higher education, but also because academic self-e cacy has been linked to characteristics that are bene cial when experiencing a transition, e.g., coping strategies and stress management. It can thus be expected that students with high levels of self-e cacy at the end of
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