Relative achievement of students in timber technology department in relation to the type of secondary school they attended

The joint longitudinal sociological research conducted by the Forestry Faculty, Zagreb University and the Cabinet for Sociology focused on factors such as social background, social status, and other important towards study of students enrolled in the Timber Technology Department. We established that students deciding on Timber Technology have studied in many different kinds of schools and consequently arrive with different orientation. We then investigated the relative achievement of the students and linked it to the type of secondary school they had completed. We also examined how many students did not complete their Timber Technology studies and terminate their studies at the end who are those that terminate of their first year. Having used established sociometric methods we found that from 1960 - 1990 (table 1) the success of students in Timber Technology averaged at 21 .3 percent. That is the number of students who successfully completed the first year of study. Only 15.9 percent of all successful students who had completed the first year of study, went on to graduate in Timber Technology study. We see the reason for such poor achievement in Timber Technology in the ready acceptance of students regardless of the type of secondary school completed. Students are admitted to Timber Technology after they have passed a preliminary entrance exam. We have established that successful timber technology students have completed some twenty different professional streams (table 2). We investigated then the average achievement of students (table 3) of Timber Technology Secondary school had been completed with excellent results by 31.1 percent of the students. However, in Timber Technology only one student achieved excellent results. 14.7 percent of the students had "very good" as their average mark, ... 62.2 percent attained the mark "good". The mark "pass" was given to 17.1 percent of the students. We avance the hypothesis that some secondary schools are inappropriate for a future study of Timber Technology. We have investigated what kind of success in Timber Technology is attained by students who had average results in secondary school (table 4). We have concluded that the best results are achieved by students who had completed chemical technology stream in secondary school (middle/secondary result (3.8) followed by those from economic schools (3.3) and then mathematical, informatics, electrotechnical and civil engineering (3.2). Students who had completed Timber Technology in secondary school achieved an 'average' result (good 3) which is true of many other streams. However when we analysed the second parameter, namely, the 'dropping out of study' (leaving study) rate we found that only the students with appropriate Timber Technology orientation do not leave their study. Similar the those are the results for various technical and natural science streams, while the students of socielly oriented streams leave Timber Technology... Students who completed administration/management, legal (72.7) and economic streams (75.0) leave Timber Technology study. The data attained, therefore, suggests that Timber Technology would not need to accept students of socially oriented schools. Secondary school however (timber technology) needs more attention to chemistry, mathematics and other subjects which are necessary for a sustained successful study.