Adolescent Lives in Transition: How Social Class Influences the Adjustment to Middle School

Introduction

179 Introduction When I began this study, I hypothesized that children from Hillside and Two Rivers would have a harder time during the transition. So far, my findings do not demonstrate more difficult transition for HillsideTwo Rivers children, even though they had to adjust to more dramatic changes: they got up earlier, rode the bus longer, and attended school in a new town. What would pre- and post-transition assessments of selfesteem , participation in extracurricular activities, and academic status show? Research on self-esteem across the transition to the middle grades has yielded very mixed results (Seidman et al., 1994), but research has consistently shown a decline in extracurricular participation and, in schools with ability grouping, a decline in perceived academic competence in children from lower social class backgrounds (Simmons and Blyth, 1987). Students from both Lakeview and Hillside-Two Rivers arrived at the middle school as a well-matched group in terms of grades, participation, and peer relationships. At the end of the transition year, would these two groups continue to match each other in these important areas or would one group move ahead of the other? In Part I, I proposed that the social and economic conditions of Lakeview and Hillside have resulted in some similar and some divergent values pertaining to the role and methods of schooling and the socialization of children. In Part II, I demonstrated how children, influenced by their early socialization and community values, anticipate seventh grade, interact with peers, and evaluate their school from different standpoints. The following three chapters will examine self-esteem, participation, and academic standing across the transition. These three chapters are combined in one section because of the theoretical and empirical connections between self-esteem, participatory belonging, and academic competence. I wondered if outcomes in these three areas would be influenced by the students’ susceptibility to social comparisons and to school structures like ability grouping and selective sports teams. At the age of twelve or thirteen, there may not be words to describe the especially powerful, emotional dimensions of adolescent life. In these chapters, descriptive statistics are used to further extend our understanding of how the research participants experienced the transition . There is no intent to imply generalizability—the research cohort of only thirty students is too small to make inferences—but the numerical data add to our understanding of what these particular students experienced and these results often parallel results from much larger research cohorts. 180 Adolescent Lives in Transition ...