Page 60 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

1997). Regarding the last type of motivation theories, modern expectancy-value theories relate achievement to the individual’s expectancy and task value beliefs. Students’ expectancies of learning results and, to a smaller extent, the value they adhere to the learning task at hand have been shown to relate to rst-year achievement (Jones, Paretti, Hein, & Knott, 2010).
3.2.2 Factors related to (interaction with) the learning environment
Characteristics and perceptions of the learning environment 3 Learning environment characteristics are factors outside of students’ control.
Important and well-studied characteristics are the quantity of instruction, the
perceived quality of the learning environment, and the teaching approach. e
quantity of instruction can be measured by the number of contact hours in the programme (Bruinsma & Jansen, 2005). Perceived quality of the learning environment can consist of, among other things, students’ perceptions of the quality of teachers, of the clarity of goals and standards, and of the quality of assessment (Ramsden, 1991). Research showed that student perceptions are reasonably reliable indicators of instructional quality (Pascarella, Seifert, & Whitt, 2008). Another important learning environment characteristic is the teaching approach. Whereas the teacher-centered approach – e.g., lectures for a large number of students with a focus on transmitting knowledge – used to be the standard teaching approach in postsecondary education for a long time, in the last decades, teachers have been using more student-centered teaching approaches (Davidson, Major, & Michaelsen, 2014). Characteristic of the latter approaches is that they focus on students’ learning instead of on teachers’ teaching (Cannon & Newble, 2000). An example of such a student-centered approach is problem- based learning (PBL), where students learn through the process of facilitated problem-solving (Hmelo-Silver, 2004). Student-centered approaches have been increasingly adopted in the Netherlands and Flanders in recent years.
Psychosocial factors
Psychosocial factors relate to the way students interact with and experience the higher education environment. In this regard, these factors combine student characteristics and characteristics of the learning environment. Most research on psychosocial factors in higher education draws on Tinto’s (1975) theory of student attrition, which focuses on academic integration (e.g., identi cation with
Systematic review of rst-year success
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