Making the Transition: The Impact of Moving from Elementary to Secondary School on Adolescents' Academic Achievement and Psychological Adjustment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Early adolescence is a time of rapid social, cognitive, and physical change. For some youth, these changes can make this period a vulnerable point in development. Adding to the stress, some students transfer from an elementary school to a middle school or to a comprehensive high school. While the impact on youth of moving to a higher level of schooling has been the focus of intense research and debate in the United States, surprisingly little research has been conducted examining how Canadian youth make this transition within the context of Canadian schools. With this in mind, this paper examines the academic, behavioural and emotional adjustment of Canadian adolescents who transfer from an elementary school to a middle or comprehensive high school and compares their outcomes to those of a group of youth who did not change schools. Results of several statistical analyses suggest that changing schools had little systematic association to adolescents' academic outcomes. This held true regardless of whether the school was a middle school or a comprehensive high school. Similarly, transferring to a middle school had little negative association to adolescents' emotional and behavioural outcomes. Indeed, with respect to social aggression, the analyses suggested that students in middle schools may use indirect or socially directed aggression less frequently than students who remained in elementary school. However, transferring directly from an elementary school to a comprehensive high school appeared to have some negative emotional consequences. Youth who moved directly from an elementary school to a high school reported greater symptoms of physical stress. Further, female students who directly transfer to high schools at ages 12 and 13, reported higher levels of depressive affect than female adolescents who remained in an elementary school.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".