Elisabeth Roels

Developing Columbus: study orientation for higher education

My PhD is part of the ‘Columbus’ project and focuses on competences and concepts that can be used to help secondary school students with their transition to higher education, in terms of study orientation, academic achievement and decision-making. Driven by practical needs, such as low study succes rates, a new instrument ‘Columbus’ is developed, combining tests, questionnaires and scales. The concepts and constructs measured are motivation, areas of interests, self-efficacy, choosing processes, study strategies, reasoning, vocabulary and academic language proficiency, and basic mathematics. I aim to gain insight in the validity and reliability of the instrument as a whole. Another goal is also to track students’ during their first years in higher education, in order to investigate the predictive validity of the instrument with regard to academic achievement.

http://columbus.onderwijskiezer.be/