Page 77 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 3
terms of factors predicting students’ success in the rst year. One reason for this is that we only included peer-reviewed papers in academic journals. Quite some cross-sectional and longitudinal Flemish research on rst-year student success has been published as a book (chapter) or research report (e.g., Donche, Coertjens, Van Daal, De Maeyer, & Van Petegem, 2013; Donche & Van Petegem, 2011; Van Daal et al., 2013; Van Esbroeck et al., 2001). It would have been interesting to see whether there would be di erences between the Netherlands and Flanders that could be attributable to the di erent systems, i.e., the Flemish higher education system, which is accessible from all levels of secondary education, and the Dutch higher education system, that has more access restrictions by requiring a certain level of the secondary education diploma.
Second, we chose to only include factors in the analysis that were investigated by at least two studies, because only then we could compare the results. is le out some interesting factors that had only been investigated by one study, such as employment, self-esteem, attributional style, the study choice process in secondary school, and the attention paid to skill development in the curriculum.
A third limitation is that this review is a narrative synthesis and not a meta- analysis. Although a meta-analysis would have provided stronger evidence, we decided not to perform a meta-analysis because this would have put even stricter criteria on the data in the studies. Consequently, performing a meta-analysis would have resulted in the loss of even more studies. Another meta-analysis assumption that could not be met is that the underlying constructs are the same. Many variables that we included in the results were investigated by just one or two studies. Furthermore, as we discussed above, many studies had di erent operationalisations of the same construct. us, performing a meta-analysis would have meant that we could only have focused on factors that were investigated in the same way by multiple studies, which would have led to a substantive loss of information.
As in many reviews, the results might be distorted by publication bias. We do not believe, however, that this is a considerable problem in our review, since many studies included multiple variables, some of which had signi cant relationships with academic outcomes and some of which did not, which is why non-signi cant results could in most cases not have been a reason for non- publication. Nevertheless, it would have been interesting to also include policy reports, book chapters, papers published in professional literature, and PhD and
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