Dynamics of Adaptation to Secondary School: Do Cognitive and Socioemotional Within-Person Processes Predict Successful Transition?

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Florian Schmiedek
• Subject Area: Developmental and Educational Psychology
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 283619097

For the majority of 9- to 12-year-old children in Germany, transition to secondary school is a critical life event accompanied by challenging and stressful experiences. Children need to adapt to the new circumstances involving changes in their academic and social lives. Previous studies have shown large between-person differences in adjustment and achievement trajectories during the first years of secondary school. However, the processes underlying successful adaptation to secondary school remain unclear. Self-regulation is needed, given the manifold processes of adaptation, including increased investment of cognitive resources for school achievement, dealing with stressful experiences and building new social relationships. Moreover, these cognitive and socioemotional processes are likely coupled with each other. To capture all these processes, we will investigate adaptation to secondary school by embedding a micro-longitudinal design of four weeks including four daily ambulatory assessments during school and free time into a longitudinal design of yearly assessments from grades 4 to 6. By studying 200 children's daily cognitive, self-regulatory, and socioemotional processes before transition using ambulatory assessment methods, we aim to construe the foundation for understanding daily fluctuations in these processes and to examine their dynamic interplay (i.e., within-person couplings). Following these children through to the post-transition phase will allow us to examine the role of short-term adaptation processes and between-person differences in their couplings for the prediction of successful adaptation. We assume that the adaptation process will be accompanied by increased fluctuations of daily cognitive and socioemotional processes. We hypothesize that between-person differences in the daily couplings of these short-term adaptation processes will predict successful long-term adaptation as reflected in school achievement and social adjustment.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Judith Dirk