ABSTRACT
This chapter describes girls’ functioning in the school environment at age 13 and again at age 16. These descriptions take the forms of patterns, each of which reflects the ability and school adaptation of a homogeneous subgroup of individuals. To define patterns of girls’ functioning in the school environment requires us, first, to select relevant variables to serve as indicators of the girls’ patterns. The indicators chosen to represent the ability/adaptation domain we discuss in the chapter reflect the girls’ intelligence, academic achievement, perception of their own ability, and self-reported adaptation to the academic aspects of the school environment. The subjects whose ability and school adaptation patterns were analyzed at each age comprised all females in the Individual Development and Adjustment project for whom complete data were available at that age. At each age, subjects’ scores on each of the five indicators formed the individual profiles or patterns.
