Making School Transitions a Positive Experience

Jacquelynne Eccles, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology,
Women Studies and Education
University of Michigan

There are substantial declines in academic motivation and achievement across the upper elementary and early secondary school years (see Anderman & Maehr, 1994; Eccles & Midgley, 1989; Eccles et al., 1993; Wigfield, Eccles & Pintrich,1996). Although these changes are not extreme for most adolescents, they are common enough to make us ask why (see Eccles & Midgley, 1989). Since academic failure and drop out is especially problematic among some ethnic groups and among youth from low SES communities and families (e.g., Schneider & Coleman, 1993), it is probable that these groups are particularly likely to show these declines in academic motivation and self-perception as they move into and through the secondary school years.

A variety of explanations exist for these "negative" changes in academic motivation: Some point to the intraspsychic upheaval associated with early adolescent development (e.g. Blos, 1965). Others point the co-occurrence of multiple life changes, e.g., Simmons & Blyth (1987) attributed these declines, particularly among females, to the coincidence of the junior high school transition with pubertal development. Still others point to the nature of the junior high school environment itself. Extending Person-Environment Fit theory (see Hunt, 1975) into a developmental perspective (Stage-Environment Fit theory), Eccles and Midgley (1989) proposed that these negative motivational changes result from the fact that traditional junior high schools do not provide developmentally appropriate educational environments for early adolescents. They suggested that different types of educational environments may be needed for different age groups in order to meet individual developmental needs and foster continued developmental growth. Exposure to the developmentally appropriate environment would facilitate both motivation and continued growth; in contrast, exposure to developmentally inappropriate environments, especially developmentally regressive environments, should create a particularly poor person-environment fit, leading to declines in motivation as well as detachment from the goals of the institution.

Eccles and Midgley (1989) argued that there are developmentally inappropriate changes at the junior high or middle school in a cluster of classroom organizational, instructional, and climate variables, including task structure, task complexity, grouping practices, evaluation techniques, motivational strategies, locus of responsibility for learning, and quality of teacher-student and student-student relationships. They hypothesized that these changes contribute to the negative change in early adolescents' motivation and achievement-related beliefs. By and large, the research findings support these predictions. For example, most junior high schools are substantially larger (by several orders of magnitude) than elementary schools and instruction is more likely to be organized departmentally. As a result, junior high school teachers typically teach several different groups of students and students, making it very difficult to form a close relationship with any school-affiliated adult at precisely the point in development when there is a great need for guidance and support from non-familial adults. Such changes in student-teacher relationships are also likely to undermine the sense of community and trust between students and teachers, leading to a lowered sense of efficacy among the teachers, an increased reliance on authoritarian control practices by the teachers, and an increased sense of alienation among the students. Finally, such changes are likely to decrease the probability that any particular student's difficulties will be noticed early enough to get the student necessary help, thus increasing the likelihood that students on the edge will be allowed to slip onto negative motivational and performance trajectories leading to increased school failure and drop out.

These structural changes are also likely to affect classroom dynamics, teacher beliefs and practices and student alienation and motivation in the ways proposed by Eccles and Midgley (1989). Some support for these predictions is emerging, along with evidence of other motivationally relevant systematic changes. Junior high schools and most middle schools have more rigid authority relationships than elementary schools; less positive affective relationships between teachers and their students; lower cultures of efficacy; more social comparison based grading systems, more performance goal orientation, and less individualized instruction.

Changes such as these have been shown to have a negative effect on adolescents' development Evidence from a variety of sources suggests that early adolescent development is characterized by increases in desire for autonomy, peer orientation, self-focus and self-consciousness, salience of identity issues, concern over heterosexual relationships, and capacity for abstract cognitive activity (see Brown, 1990; Eccles & Midgley, 1989; Harter, 1990b; Keating, 1990; Simmons & Blyth, 1987). Simmons & Blyth (1987) have argued that adolescents need safe, intellectually challenging environments to adapt to these shifts. In light of these needs, the environmental changes associated with transition to junior high school seem especially harmful in that they emphasize competition, social comparison, and ability self-assessment at a time of heightened self-focus; they decrease decision-making and choice at a time when the desire for control is growing; they emphasize lower level cognitive strategies at a time when the ability to use higher level strategies is increasing; and they disrupt social networks at a time when adolescents are especially concerned with peer relationships and may be in special need of close adult relationships outside of the home. Consequently, the nature of these environmental changes, coupled with the normal course of individual development, is likely to result in a poor "fit" between early adolescents and their classroom environment, increasing the risk of negative motivational outcomes, especially for low achieving adolescents. One important future task is to assess how common and general these kinds of mismatches between school environments and early adolescent development are across different kinds of educational settings, different regions of the country, and different groups of early adolescents.

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