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123 C H A P T E R 5 Sixth Grade Hopes, Seventh Grade Discoveries The students in my study perceived the transition to Mountainview Middle School as a challenge and as an opportunity. The task before them seemed both scary and exciting, offering new experiences, friends, and teachers. Their answers to my questions when they were in the sixth grade indicated that they felt the stakes were high, particularly the social stakes; fitting in, being liked, and feeling valued mattered to them more than anything. Transition to a different school is an emotionally charged task. Several students from both communities expressed that they expected to feel nervous and scared in the first few days of school. Students expressed feeling anxious about having several teachers instead of one, learning to use their lockers, finding their classrooms in a new building, staying organized and on time, and being able to remember their homework assignments. They hoped the nervous, scared feeling would be a temporary phase in their adjustment to their new environment. Being able to successfully accomplish a task that is perceived to have a high level of challenge and the possibility of failure promotes a sense of competence and confidence (Bandura, 1977). Likewise, to fail at the primary tasks of early adolescence may set the stage for increased alienation from school and peers (Finn, 1989). In this case, being able to master the middle school environment and the social, cognitive, and practical challenges it poses comes at a time when adolescents are also moving toward greater autonomy. The combination of perceived risk while simultaneously being more independent makes this a particularly loaded period of development, laden with potential for both disappointment and accomplishment. Much is learned about self-efficacy as students come to this new environment and succeed or fail. There is perhaps no other period of development where so much is learned, accurate or not, about the self and others. As the research participants approached the end of their sixth grade year, I wanted to know how they were thinking and feeling about going to the middle school. I asked each of the thirty-two students in the study to complete sentences on a questionnaire about their hopes, worries , feelings, and interests. (A sample of the questionnaire is in Appendix 4. Thirty-two students were involved in the study in grade six but over the summer two students moved out of the district leaving a research group of thirty in grade seven.) From their answers, it became evident that as sixth graders imagined themselves at their new school, they were most excited by the prospect of making new friends and most worried that they would fail at that essential task. All thirty-two sixth grade students seemed able to visualize themselves in their new school, naming situations that they expected to encounter, like new teachers, more homework, and a new building where they would need to find their way. Their ability to anticipate concrete aspects of their new environment indicates that these students were preparing themselves psychologically for this transition and for the challenges and opportunities their new environment would offer them. In almost every case, going to a new school with many dozens of new classmates was named as something to be excited about and something to be worried about. As they moved toward seventh grade, social acceptance was their primary concern and meeting new academic challenges was a close secondary concern. I studied the written sentence completions for common themes and categorized the answers in the following domains: social, cognitive , physical, affective, and development toward independence. Social comments included references to making new friends, keeping old friends, being liked by others, and being a good friend to others. Comments in the cognitive domain, included statements about getting good grades, trying hard, doing well in particular subject areas, getting work done on time, and having more class work and homework. Physical responses included comments about sports and physical ability . Affective responses revealed how students felt about going to the middle school and the way they wanted others to feel about them. Statements about having more responsibility and more privileges, being treated as an adult, and feeling older were categorized in the “development toward independence” domain. Students from both communities made social and cognitive comments three times more often than physical, affective, or developmental comments combined. Lakeview children had about a third more cognitive responses than Hillside-Two Rivers children (28 responses from Lakeview students, 18 responses from Hillside...

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