Page 79 - Secondary school students’ university readiness and their transition to university Els van Rooij

Chapter 3
and Flanders, it would be interesting to design a large-scale comparative study that would investigate possible di erences in academic success predictors between these two countries that could perhaps be attributable to the closed versus open access system. Variables that proved in this review to be consistently related to academic outcomes could be included in this research, as well as the variables that yielded less conclusive results or only results for one or two success outcomes, which causes us to keep wondering about their (overall) impact. Also, it would be interesting to take a systematic look at possible di erences between elds of study, as some studies found that some factors were only related to students’ outcomes in some degree programmes or there were di erences in the strength of the relationships (e.g., Kamphorst, Hofman, Jansen, & Terlouw, 2012; Vermunt, 2005).
e same is the case for comparing professional education and university education. We only clearly found that gender was more important in professional than in university education. If the existence of di erences in other categories would be systematically investigated, we would gain insight in what makes professional students and university students successful in the rst year, which would help institutes to tailor their rst-year programme to the students’ needs.
A fruitful rst step to strengthen research and further theory development on the impact of di erent factors on student success in Dutch and Flemish higher education would be to develop an instrument repository with validated Dutch translations of instruments that is open for use by researchers in this eld and to establish more collaborations between researchers at di erent higher education institutes, so that large-scale studies can be more jointly designed.
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