Education
Transition from Primary School
Transition Between Primary and Secondary School: Why it is Important and How it can be Supported is a literature review on this topic! Not everything will be relevant to you but it will give you ideas. See me and I'll print it our so you can see how they organised their info. don't copy it though 'cause your teachers will have seen it too.
Definitions
Keywords for this process are
- TRANSITION
- resilience (ability to bounce back)
Significance - quote mental health statistics for this age group (compared to primary school)
- Yr 7 students suffering from anxiety need help. random news article not reliable. find back up.
- Supporting Young People’s Emotional Wellbeing During The Transition To Secondary School In Regional Australia provides a comprehensive overview of factors influencing the transition to secondary school from the perspectives of young people, their parents and teachers. It points out that "children at increased risk of experiencing a difficult transition to secondary school include emotional and behavioural difficulties, prior difficult experiences in primary school and limited engagement in extracurricular activities; these signal characteristics require the attention of educators and researchers" (p.
- Middle Years of Schooling highlights academic problems that seem to begin between yr 6-7.
- Transition matters: pupils’ experiences of the primary–secondary school transition in the West of Scotland and consequences for well‐being and attainment goes into detail about school transition (academic stuff) and peer transitions (friendship stuff) and how they affect students in the long term. He also identifies students who are most at risk from a socio-emotional context. Read the discussion 'cause the data section is full of statistical stuff you haven't learned yet. the tables are good summaries so take the time to open them.
Issues to explore
- In class: High support classroom to low support classroom, new subjects they have no background in (Science, TAS , LOTE), many teachers instead of one,
- New responsibilities: bringing all equipment, getting to school on public transport, finding classrooms
- At home: increased homework, potentially increased chores (esp. if they have siblings)
- Social circles: new friends, loss of old friends, new social context brings new values and behaviours
- Psychological issues : fears based on myths (eg specific forms of bullying - "bag being dumped in")
Students' views
- Perceptions of students and parents involved in primary to secondary transition programmes has a fantastic table on p.3 that divides impact into physical, personal and educations. You could use this table in your review. P.5 has really good ideas for your questionnaire.
- Voices from Schools: Listening to Australian students in transition summarises students own comments. It has a list of positive and negative anticipations be yr 6 students on p.132. Overall the students seemed to be positive about high school and feel they were "ready" for the new experience (p.133-4).
Education-based documents (includes lots of strategies as well as identifying impacts)
Transition from Primary to Secondary School . Also points out that students are moving from being "big kids" in school to "little kids" in school -change of status is always a majorly traumatic event.
Transitioning from Primary to Secondary School. has well-being points on p.10. Lots of strategies for school to try. also points out importance of communication, and that this coincides with physical changes (puberty) which may make this period even more confusing.
Middle Years of Schooling Section 2 highlights various issues under similar well-being subheadings to those you use in CAFS. Be careful though, cause it reflects experiences from yr 6-9 and you're only looking at yr 6-7 so you'll need to pick and choose. There's lots of good points here.
Negative reactions to transition: impatience, delay, ambivalence
I got these from Trauma, Transitions and Thriving [Don't read the article unless you have plenty of time on your hands 'cause it's Jungian psychology and mostly not relevant at all] He says "fear of future instability and change," (p.43) cause people to hold onto the things that are holding them back from growth as individuals. Going to high school is a rite of passage designed to help children cope with this transition. It therefore needs to provide "anchors." "An anchor is any stimulus that evokes a consistent emotional response pattern from a person." Many strategies used by schools function this way. some of the things he describes as anchors are: symbols (eg a new uniform), community connectedness (eg class getting to know you activities, peer support networks), being mindful (conscious of how one is feeling - some peer support activities are designed to do this. So are some class activities in PDHPE or English) and staying true to yourself (this one is a problem in yr 7 when students are exposed to new values and ideas from their new friends).
How can we engage students better at school?
Whether or not school is "fun" comes from a students' perspectives, but "engagement" takes the perspective of a teacher. this project looks at some of the ways schools and the people who teach there can make students feel that they "belong" there and want to learn in their classes. For an overview of the issues, read this article from The conversation [https://theconversation.com/australian-students-are-becoming-increasingly-disengaged-at-school-heres-why-51570] and look at the links to articles they got their information from.
Top tips for rengaging students [https://ukedchat.com/2013/03/14/session-142/] and Mind/shift [https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/03/03/20-strategies-for-motivating-reluctant-learners/]have some basic definitions of engagement and lists some classroom strategies that have been known to work.
Engaging and Reengaging Students in Learning at School [http://www.smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/engagingandre-engagingstudents.pdf] has some excellent definitions of the different sorts of engagement (p.2) and a summary of the main points (more about motivation than engagement, but motivation is linked to engagement) in the left-hand margin.
Sometimes disenagement happens because of things outside the classroom. Student Disengagement from Primary schooling [http://www.cassfoundation.org/2016/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/StudentDisengagement.pdf] has an excellent list of factors leading to disengagement on p.9. Teachers call students who face these challenges "At Risk students" and try hard to enge them in school. The tables on pp11-12 and p.17 show some of the ways schools can change to help these students. Even though this article is about primary schools, the information is relevant to yrs 7-9 (and in somecoases 7-12) in high schools.
A more academic study which looks at how to reengage disengaged (esp. Aboriginal) Students is Engaging Secondary Students in Lifelong Learning. Look especially at the conclusions on pp25-27.
Engaging Students: Creating Classrooms that improve student learning [https://grattan.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Engaging-students-creating-classrooms-that-improve-learning.pdf] is a set of recommendations for schools and politicians made by the Grattan Institute after studying engagement teachers, students, parents, policy makers and other stakeholders in the Education community. It includes excellent graphs and statistics about classroom behaviours.
The Measurement of Student engagement [https://www.lcsc.org/cms/lib6/MN01001004/Centricity/Domain/108/The%20Measurement%20of%20Student%20Engagement-%20A%20Comparative%20Analysis%20of%20Various%20Methods.pdf] If you're interested in methodology, this paper analyses the effectiveness of using self-reporting of students engagement in academic studies. If you can read the university-level language, it might give you some ideas for how to ask better questions in you questionairre.
Engaging Students in School and Learning: The Real Deal for School Completion [http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09362830802590102?journalCode=hexc20] looks at factors which lead to school dropout. You need to access this article through your local or state library.
Top tips for rengaging students [https://ukedchat.com/2013/03/14/session-142/] and Mind/shift [https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/03/03/20-strategies-for-motivating-reluctant-learners/]have some basic definitions of engagement and lists some classroom strategies that have been known to work.
Engaging and Reengaging Students in Learning at School [http://www.smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/engagingandre-engagingstudents.pdf] has some excellent definitions of the different sorts of engagement (p.2) and a summary of the main points (more about motivation than engagement, but motivation is linked to engagement) in the left-hand margin.
Sometimes disenagement happens because of things outside the classroom. Student Disengagement from Primary schooling [http://www.cassfoundation.org/2016/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/StudentDisengagement.pdf] has an excellent list of factors leading to disengagement on p.9. Teachers call students who face these challenges "At Risk students" and try hard to enge them in school. The tables on pp11-12 and p.17 show some of the ways schools can change to help these students. Even though this article is about primary schools, the information is relevant to yrs 7-9 (and in somecoases 7-12) in high schools.
A more academic study which looks at how to reengage disengaged (esp. Aboriginal) Students is Engaging Secondary Students in Lifelong Learning. Look especially at the conclusions on pp25-27.
Engaging Students: Creating Classrooms that improve student learning [https://grattan.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Engaging-students-creating-classrooms-that-improve-learning.pdf] is a set of recommendations for schools and politicians made by the Grattan Institute after studying engagement teachers, students, parents, policy makers and other stakeholders in the Education community. It includes excellent graphs and statistics about classroom behaviours.
The Measurement of Student engagement [https://www.lcsc.org/cms/lib6/MN01001004/Centricity/Domain/108/The%20Measurement%20of%20Student%20Engagement-%20A%20Comparative%20Analysis%20of%20Various%20Methods.pdf] If you're interested in methodology, this paper analyses the effectiveness of using self-reporting of students engagement in academic studies. If you can read the university-level language, it might give you some ideas for how to ask better questions in you questionairre.
Engaging Students in School and Learning: The Real Deal for School Completion [http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09362830802590102?journalCode=hexc20] looks at factors which lead to school dropout. You need to access this article through your local or state library.