Page 62 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

impact on students’ engagement with learning. Student engagement has been a popular construct in higher education research in the last decade (Zepke, 2017a) and refers to students’ involvement in education (Zepke, 2017b). Here, we focus on behavioural engagement. Compared to cognitive and emotional engagement, behavioural engagement is highly visible, because it consists of observable indicators such as attendance, time on task, active participation, and preparation (Christenson, Stout, & Pohl, 2012; Fredricks, Blumenfeld, & Paris, 2004).
3.3 Method 3
3.3.1 Database searches
To nd relevant articles, we used search terms in line with the aims of our review. Since our review concerns higher education in the Netherlands and Flanders, we used “(university OR “higher education”) AND (Netherlands OR Flanders OR Belgium)”. Furthermore, relevant studies had to have an outcome measure indicating academic success, thus GPA, number of credits obtained (EC), retention (or the reverse, dropout), or study progress (or the reverse, delay). erefore, we added “(“stud* success” OR achiev* OR perform* OR “drop* out” OR complet* OR persist* OR retention OR attain* OR attrition OR progress*)” to the search terms. e databases we used for our search were ERIC, PsychINFO, Web of Science, and SocIndex.
3.3.2 Criteria for selecting studies
Eight inclusion criteria were applied for article selection, which are presented in Table 3.1.
We used 2000 as a time limitation, because papers older than 17 years would have been outdated. e eighth inclusion criterion concerned the scope of our review. e focus in this review is on student characteristics of rst-year students in general and features of the learning environment. Hence, we excluded articles that focused on speci c groups of students without reporting the results of the whole group, e.g., studies that focused on students with a migrant background, international students, or only female or male students. Moreover, papers that did not exclusively focus on rst-year students, but on all bachelor students, were excluded. To assess the quality of the article, we applied the ‘eight principles of scienti c research’ from the American Educational Research Association (AERA,
Systematic review of rst-year success
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