Page 47 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 2
books thoroughly for a test” and “Writing an essay on an academic subject in your own eld of interest, based on research evidence”. Results of an exploratory factor analysis revealed that six of these 15 items formed one scale. at scale had an alpha of .70.
For Chapter 5, we used an existing scale of academic self-e cacy speci cally for higher education, the College Academic Self-E cacy Scale (CASES; Owen & Froman, 1988), that we came across a er the data for Chapter 4 had already been collected. is scale matched nicely with what we intended to measure. We used 29 of the 33 CASES items. Two items were eliminated because they overlapped with other items (e.g., “Tutoring another student” was very similar to “Explaining a concept to another student”) and two items because we felt they were not very relevant (e.g., “Talking to a professor privately to get to know him or her”). Items related to social skills that are needed in university were missing, so we added the following two statements: “Collaborating with other students on an assignment for class” and “Making new friends at university”. Students had to indicate on a 5-point Likert-scale how con dent they were that they could perform these tasks successfully. Exploratory factor analysis showed that three separate constructs could be measured with 16 of the items: self-e cacy in understanding university- level content (8 items), self-e cacy in putting in the necessary amount of e ort needed to be a successful student (4 items), and self-e cacy regarding typical social skills needed in university (4 items). Social self-e cacy had a low alpha (.66), so we did not use that factor in the analyses for Chapter 5. e total self- e cacy scale had an alpha of .80.
ese 16 items of academic self-e cacy were used again in Chapter 7, where we measured rst-year university students’ self-e cacy. Here we only used the total scale, which had an alpha of .72.
2.2.6 Learning strategies
For the study in Chapter 5 we measured four learning strategies: surface learning, deep learning, metacognitive learning, and self-regulated learning. All were measured by items from the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire, part B (MSLQ; Pintrich, Smith, Garcia, & MCKeachie, 1991). e four learning strategies were formed from the following MSLQ subscales:
- Surface learning (4 items): rehearsal.
- Deep learning (15 items): elaboration, organisation, and critical
thinking.
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