Abstract
For decades, success in postsecondary education has preoccupied psychological and educational researchers. In this respect, Tinto's student integration model (1982, 1997) is one of the most frequently cited models. Tinto proposed that students' background characteristics, initial intentions and aspirations towards college influence their academic and social integration, which in turn affect their persistence. Unfortunately, although this model is an integrative one, it does not take motivational variables such as students' self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997; Bong & Skaalvik, 2003) and students' subjective value of academic tasks (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002; Neuville, 2004) into account although their impact on learning has been widely demonstrated (Robbins, Lauver, Le, Davis, & Langley, 2004). The purpose of this study, conducted with 2637 first-year university students from all the Bachelor's degree programs of a Belgian university, is to compare, through structural equation models, the explanatory power of these two research traditions (students' integration, on the one hand, and a motivational paradigm, on the other hand) in predicting students' academic performance.
Highlights
The transition from high school to college in Belgium is invariably accompanied by several changes in students’ educational environment: a) heightened academic competition, b) increased pressure to excel, c) unfamiliar academic tasks, d) more frequent academic failure and e) new social networks (Perry, Hladkyj, Pekrun, & Pelletier, 2001)
In Belgium, 55% of entering students do not graduate and 20% of those 55% drop out during first year (SET, Service des études UCL, 2006)
Julia Schmitz and Gentiane Boudrenghien are Researchers. They are all affiliated with the Department of Educational and Developmental Psychology, Université catholique de Louvain
Summary
The transition from high school to college in Belgium is invariably accompanied by several changes in students’ educational environment: a) heightened academic competition, b) increased pressure to excel, c) unfamiliar academic tasks, d) more frequent academic failure and e) new social networks (Perry, Hladkyj, Pekrun, & Pelletier, 2001). In these conditions, the risk of dropout during the first year of college is high. Julia Schmitz and Gentiane Boudrenghien are Researchers They are all affiliated with the Department of Educational and Developmental Psychology, Université catholique de Louvain.
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