Page 59 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 3
are di erences regarding the level and type of prior education, but also di erences regarding secondary school coursework.
Personality
Previous research also investigated the relationship between personality traits and academic achievement. e importance of personality traits in explaining achievement lies therein that whereas cognitive ability predicts what a student can do (i.e., maximum performance), personality contributes to the prediction of what a student will do (i.e., typical performance) (Furnham & Chamorro- Premuzic, 2004). e most widely used framework of personality is the ve-factor model (FFM) of personality (McCrae & Costa, 1997), also known as the Big Five dimensions of personality, which consists of the dimensions of agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, extraversion, and openness to experience. Another personality characteristic that in uences achievement is procrastination, i.e., “to voluntarily delay an intended course of action despite expecting to be worse o for the delay” (Steel, 2007, p. 66). Research showed that procrastination has su cient temporal and situational stability to be perceived as a personality trait (Steel, 2007).
Motivation
Motivational variables are o en used in studies into higher education success. Common motivation theories related to academic achievement are: a) theories that focus on self-e cacy and self-concept; b) theories that focus on reasons for engagement; and c) the expectancy-value theory (Eccles & Wig eld, 2002). Self- e cacy theories concern an individual’s belief in how successful he or she will be in performing a certain task (Bandura, 1997). As such, this rst type of theories relate achievement to individuals’ e cacy expectations and outcome expectations. Within the second type of motivation theories, those focusing on reasons for people to engage in certain tasks, a prominent theory is the self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000). In this theory, the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is important, i.e., performing an activity for sheer interest or fun respectively to obtain, gain, or avoid losing something. Another theory related to reasons for engagement is goal theory. Research into the relationship between goals and achievement tends to incorporate the distinction between performance and mastery goals. Performance goals can further be distinguished into performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals (Elliott & Church,
58