Page 32 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Introduction
secondary school experience a better transition to university. In this study we 1 investigated what factors were related to grade 10 and 11 students’ self-e cacy
in being a successful university student. Gaining more insight into these factors
could lead to guidelines for teachers on how to improve their students’ self-e cacy.
Factors taken into account were the personality variable need for cognition, the motivational variable academic interest, and two engagement variables: behavioural engagement and out-of-school academic activities. As background variables, we included gender, coursework, and level of parental education in the path model of hypothesised relationships between the factors and self-e cacy. e model was tested with structural equation modelling in Mplus and the results led to increased insight into what factors contribute to upper grade secondary school students’ self-e cacy in being successful in university.
1.7.3Chapter 5: The relationship between secondary school students’ engagement pro les and the transition to university
Engagement factors are consistently related to success in higher education (e.g., De Koning, Loyens, Rikers, Smeets, & Van der Molen, 2012; Jansen & Suhre, 2010). In this study we were interested in whether di erent groups of secondary school students could be identi ed based on di erent types and levels of engagement. Moreover, we wanted to investigate whether these engagement pro les would be related to students’ achievement and adjustment in university. at is why, in this study, we linked data collected in the last grade of secondary school to data collected one year later in the same students a er they had made the transition to university. ree di erent types of engagement measured in grade 12 formed the basis of the creation of the pro les: behavioural engagement, cognitive engagement, and intellectual engagement. Behavioural engagement concerned basic e ort and included the factors behavioural engagement (e.g., actively participating in class) and self-e cacy: e ort (e.g., being con dent that as a university student you will be able to spread your studying activities over a longer time instead of cramming the last few days before an exam). Cognitive engagement referred to putting in mental e ort and related to the quality of engagement with learning. Four learning strategies were used to capture cognitive engagement: surface learning, deep learning, metacognitive learning, and self-regulated learning. Last, intellectual engagement revolved around students’ engagement in intellectual activities and was measured by need for cognition (comparable to being curious), academic interest (e.g., being interested in research activities and research ndings), and
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