Page 73 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 3
review, however, none of the studies that included extrinsic motivation found a signi cant relationship with success outcomes. at academic adjustment was a signi cant predictor in our review is not unexpected, since prior literature consistently showed the pivotal role of academic adjustment in predicting achievement (McKenzie & Schweitzer, 2001) and persistence (Kennedy, Sheckley, & Kehrhahn, 2000) in higher education. Social adjustment, in contrast, was not always found to be a signi cant predictor of GPA in the literature (McKenzie & Schweitzer, 2001; Petersen, Louw, & Dumont, 2009), which is in line with our results regarding social adjustment. We found that lack of regulation was negatively related to all success outcomes in both university and professional education, but, surprisingly, that self-regulation was not related to success in ve of the seven investigated relationships. We expected more positive results, in line with research that showed the importance of metacognitive strategy use such as self-regulation (Credé & Phillips, 2011; Richardson et al., 2012; Robbins et al., 2004). Important to note, however, is that the signi cant relationships that were found between self-regulation and achievement concerned university samples, so this may point to a di erence between professional education and university education, in the sense that self-regulated learning may be relatively more important in university – or at least that only in university self-regulated learning skills are re ected in GPA in EC. More research about the value of di erent types of regulation and their relationship to success at di erent levels of higher education would be welcome. Last, the importance of attendance and observed learning activities that we saw in this review showed that behavioural engagement matters. Historically, Astin’s theory of student involvement (1999) already pointed to the importance of engagement, and more recent research corroborates its importance. Class attendance, for example, has been reported to add to the prediction of grades in higher education over intelligence and personality traits (e.g., Conard, 2006; Farsides & Wood eld, 2003).
Looking at the category of learning strategies, we found non-signi cant relationships with all three outcomes for deep learning and memorising (a surface learning strategy). is was surprising, as the literature shows both positive and negative results of these factors (e.g., Richardson et al., 2012). An explanation for the non-signi cant results could be that questionnaires o en ask about students’ preferred or usual strategy use, but the use of learning strategies likely depends on external characteristics, such as the study task at hand or the course (Vermunt & Donche, 2005). Sometimes deep learning is rewarded and sometimes surface
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