ABSTRACT
For more than a decade, members of our research team have been conducting studies aimed at understanding the effect on students of the transition from elementary to middle-level schools. Certainly one of the reasons we have pursued this issue has been our interest in young adolescents and middle-level schools, and in middle school reform. However, there is another reason our research has focused on school transitions. Educational research has suffered from a lack of variation across classrooms and schools (Lipsitz, 1977; McPartland & Karweit, 1979; Sarason & Klaber, 1985). That is, many classrooms and schools do not differ markedly from one another, and thus research comparing students across classrooms or schools, or following students from one classroom or school to an-
other, has often produced disappointing results. In contrast, transitions from one school level to another provide an opportunity to look at the effects of normative change. We know that middle-level schools differ in specific ways from elementary schools. Using theory, we can make predictions regarding how those differences will be related to changes in students’perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors, and to differences between elementary and middle school teachers, thereby testing the theory.
