Page 45 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 2
Hence, some academic interest items that were suitable in secondary school were not appropriate anymore, e.g., “I look forward to studying at university” and “I am curious about what kind of academic things you could do in the eld I’m interested in”. For this reason, four items were dropped. All items that were used to measure academic interest in the three studies are displayed in the Appendix. In Chapter 7, academic interest is referred to as academic motivation.
An important note should be made here regarding the terminology in Dutch and in English. Whereas we draw from two instruments that focus on attitudes toward science, our interest was in students’ attitudes toward the academic way of thinking and academic activities (e.g., studying and doing research) in general, regardless of the eld. As such, in this thesis we were not interested in whether students are drawn to science, social science, or humanities, but the extent to which they were interested in the inquiry-based way of thinking, in gaining knowledge, in studying things in depth, and in doing research – regardless the eld or topic of study. As a consequence, when using items from these existing questionnaires, we translated ‘science’ into ‘wetenschappelijk’. In Dutch, the word ‘wetenschap’ is a general word denoting all academic elds, the academic way of thinking, and doing research. As such, is does not refer exclusively to science – science is translated as ‘natuurwetenschappen’ in Dutch. roughout the thesis we will use ‘academic interest’ to refer to ‘wetenschappelijke interesse’.
2.2.3 Behavioural engagement
In Chapters 4 and 5 we used a measure of behavioural engagement. is measure was part of a larger questionnaire that mapped more components of engagement. is was also a questionnaire that we developed ourselves, although in this case we strongly drew from existing instruments. e reason to construct a new questionnaire was that all existing ones had some items that we deemed unsuitable for the situation of Dutch secondary schools. An example were items that focused on involvement in school activities such as clubs and sports – in the Netherlands, students usually do these things at external organisations instead of at school.
Our questionnaire measured two main components of student engagement: behavioural and a ective engagement. e items were taken from the Student Engagement Instrument (Appleton, Christenson, Kim, & Reschly, 2006), the Student Engagement in Schools Questionnaire (Hart, Stewart, and Jimerson, 2011), the Engagement versus Disa ection with Learning (Skinner, Furrer, Marchand, & Kindermann, 2008), and the Identi cation With School Questionnaire (Voelkl,
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