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In this paper, the influence of personal networks and social support on study attainment of students in university education is examined. Furthermore, the paper aimed at clarifying the possible mediating role of achievement motivation, time spent on studying and working, procrastination and self-esteem. The study is a follow-up of the '89 cohort study, but is restricted to those students who have transferred to university education after finishing secondary education. The students have been approached with a questionnaire in 2004. Multinomial logistic regression shows that social support has no effect on study attainment, but that personal networks do have an effect on attainment. The relationship between social support and personal networks on the one hand and study progress on the other hand is not mediated by the before mentioned variables.Keywords Personal network Á Social support Á University Á Higher education Á Attainment Á Student Á Achievement motivation Á Self-esteem Á Procrastination Students who transfer to higher education face a number of changes in their personal and academic environment. The transition from secondary education to higher education not only calls for academic adjustment, but also includes different social demands. Students need to develop new or increased capacity for self-regulation and must learn to cope with the time pressure that is inherent in going to college. Moreover, students must integrate into a new social environment. They leave their parental house, most of their former classmates and teachers and they meet new friends, housemates and classmates. Existing supportive relationships may change or even disappear, and new supportive connections can be formed. The extent to which students succeed in integrating into this new environment and also the amount of social support received from network members possibly determines part of their academic success or failure.L. Eggens (&) Á M. P. C. van der Werf Á R. J. Bosker Groningen Institute for Educational Research, University of Groningen, Grote Rozenstraat 3, 9712 TG Groningen, The Netherlands e-mail: l.eggens@rug.nl 123High Educ (2008) 55:553-573 DOI 10.1007 Most models for explaining academic performance in higher education are based on the interaction model developed by Spady (1970Spady ( , 1971, further elaborated on by Tinto (1975). Based on these and other models, a wide range of possible determinants of academic performance has been described and tested, which can roughly be divided into contextrelated factors like curricular characteristics and assessment procedures, and studentrelated factors like gender, motivation and learning styles. These variables are mainly academic and/or personal determinants though, leaving the students' social environment out of consideration.This study examined the influence of personal networks and social support on academic attainment of students in university education. The impact of students' social support and personal network was studied together with the influence of achieve...

During recent decades, the classical one-dimensional concept of achievement motivation has become less popular among motivation researchers. This study aims to revive the concept by demonstrating its predictive power using longitudinal data from two cohort samples, each with 20,000 Dutch secondary school students. Two measures of achievement motivation were constructed on the basis of Hermans' Achievement Motivation Test for Children. Results showed that these measures predicted later educational attainment and achievement, and were related to movements in educational career. Our measures of achievement motivation showed a certain stability over time; this stability decreased, however, with the length of the interval between measurements. In addition, a consistent decrease of motivation with age was found.

This paper investigates whether several aspects of social comparison in school classes differ as a function of the type of relation between the student and his or her target. Participants were 9612 students in the first grade of secondary education in the Netherlands (equivalent to Grade 7 in the US). Results indicated that (1) 78% of the students who had at least one friend also compared with a friend; (2) social comparison with friends was much more often reciprocal than comparison with non-friends; (3) preferences for upward and downward comparison were less often given by students who compared with friends than students who compared with non-friends; (4) the similarity in initial performance level between students and their comparison targets was higher when targets were friends; (5) despite these differences, which seem to imply that friends often serve as routine standards whereas non-friends are more deliberately chosen as comparison targets, it appeared that consequences of social comparison for subsequent performance were about the same for both types of relations. Further findings of this paper suggest that previously found effects of friends' grades on subsequent performance may be explained by social comparison.

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Introduction. The study investigated the degree to which students" statistical reasoning abili-

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