1. Objectifs

Intentions :
«The overall objectives of this study were [to] obtain a more detailed portrait of adjustment trajectories during the college transition in a national random sample of students in the Québec education system, and to identify antecedents (personal and family) of and influences on subsequent academic outcomes.» (p. 686)

Questions/Hypothèses :
The authors «propose three hypotheses: […] the transition to college will be associated with decreasing social, academic, and emotional adjustment trajectories for a majority of students; […] students with more positive adjustment trajectories during the transition will show, as measured in high school, higher academic success, lower externalized behavior problems (i.e., aggression and inattention), lower personal anxiety, and higher parents’ engagement in high school; and fewer of them will leave home to attend college; and […] more students with more positive trajectories during the transition will persevere in their college program and earn a college diploma.» (p. 690)

2. Méthode

Échantillon/Matériau :
«The study sample was drawn from the participants in the ERES project (Évaluation du Renouveau à l’Enseignement Secondaire/evaluation of the high school education reform) […]. This longitudinal project was initiated in 2004 and the last data collection was in 2017. Three random samples of high school students were created from the population of all students attending a public or private high school in Québec. […] The total number of schools included for sampling was 327, and the targeted number of student participants was 1500 per cohort. […] The total sample for the present study was drawn from students in the ERES project who made the transition to college without repeating a high school year […]. This subsample comprised 1405 students (60% girls; 40% boys) […].» (p. 690)

Instruments :
Questionnaires

Type de traitement des données :
Analyse statistique

3. Résumé

The «results demonstrate that adjustment problems during the transition are determinant for youth’s academic pathways down the road. However, they suggest that the transition effect is confined to the academic experience […], and that it begins to operate in fourth year high school. Colleges and high schools are recommended to intervene early in high school and to tailor interventions to reduce anxiety, deal with worries, and dispel false beliefs, while strengthening attentional and decision-making strategies.» (p. 707) «Surprisingly, [the authors] found very few significant relationships between family determinants (parental engagement in school life and leaving home to attend college) and student adjustment trajectories. The only significant relationships were with social adjustment, but with quite small effect size. It is therefore possible that these determinants [had] very limited power to predict future trajectory membership. It is also possible that the use of parent-reported engagement in school life as a measure may have limited or qualified the strength of the relationships with student’s adjustment trajectories. The vast majority of previous studies that found associations between parental support and student’s college adjustment used student-reported measures of parental support […]. Their measures could have artificially amplified the effect of the associations between what the parents actually did and the quality of their child’s adjustment.» (p. 704)