Children in Transition: Challenges and Opportunities in Adjusting to Secondary School

Each year, about 200,000 children in the Netherlands—and many more around the globe—make the transition from primary to secondary school. Many will do fine after this major life change, but others experience serious declines in adjustment in secondary school. The aim of the present dissertation is to better understand why children differ in their social, academic, and psychological adjustment following the transition to secondary school. To this end, a 5-wave longitudinal study was conducted, with one wave of data collection before and four waves after the transition to secondary school. In four chapters, we zoomed in on specific child characteristics theorized to be of importance for the form of adjustment at hand. Chapter 2 describes two newly developed behavioral personality tests, measuring behavior theorized to be diagnostic for conscientiousness and agreeableness in standardized computer tasks. These short tests—administered before the school transition (N=322)—predicted real-life outcomes after the school transition: conscientiousness predicted report card grades and agreeableness predicted social acceptance by peers, even when controlling for prior levels of academic and social adjustment and self-reported personality. In Chapter 3 one of these behavioral tasks was used in a cross-sectional study (N=477) on the impact of popularity on the link between children’s prosocial tendencies (i.e., agreeableness) and their perceived friendship quality. Results showed that prosocial tendencies are associated with higher perceived friendship quality among nonpopular children, but not among popular children, for whom friendship quality was high regardless of their prosocial tendencies. Popular children may have other compensating characteristics, that make them attractive for peers to be friends with. Chapter 4 examines individual differences in self-esteem change in a 3-wave cross-transitional longitudinal study (N=306). Supporting sociometer theory—which posits that self-esteem functions as a gauge of social acceptance—we found that disappointing social acceptance after the transition to secondary school predicted decreased self-esteem during the school year; higher-than-expected social acceptance predicted increased self-esteem. The higher children’s level of neuroticism, the more reactive their self-esteem was to discrepancies between expected and experienced acceptance. Chapter 5 studies the impact of report card grades on changes in school engagement over the course of the first semester in secondary school. A 3-wave longitudinal study (N=375) showed that lower report card grades predicted larger decreases in both emotional and behavioral school engagement over time. These links were mediated by children’s positive and negative affective reactions. Moreover, boys and children who perceived the performance norms in their class to be high were more affectively reactive to their grades, which in turn increased the changes in emotional engagement they showed. In conclusion, how children adapt to their new school environment depends on many factors, including their personality, their pre-transitional expectations, and post-transitional experiences including how well they feel accepted by their new classmates and the grades they receive. For the majority of children the transition is an exciting and challenging time, but for some it may pose a risk to their adjustment, while for others it turns out to be a time of opportunities.