The Development of Self-Efficacy During the Transition from Primary to Secondary Education: The Moderating Effect of Ability Grouping

The transition from primary to secondary education is considered one of the most stressful experiences in an adolescents’ life. During this transition, students face academic, social, and emotional challenges, including the move from a familiar setting with one teacher, one classroom, and a known peer group, into a larger school setting with multiple teachers, unfamiliar peers, and increased academic expectations. Students’ psychological adjustment during these educational transitions, and later in life, is shaped by their self-efficacy. The move to secondary education can either bolster or undermine students’ self-efficacy, depending on their experiences within their new educational environment. As self-efficacy is domain-specific, academic, social and emotional self-efficacy refer to related but distinct domains that predict different developmental outcomes, such as academic performance, mental wellbeing and the ability to regulate emotions. Prior research has often focused on only one domain, most frequently academic self-efficacy, which limits insights into whether transition-related changes occur to all forms of self-efficacy or are domain-specific. Studying these domains separately allows for a more precise understanding of how students adapt across multiple areas of functioning during their educational transition. The extent to which self-efficacy develops or declines during the transition might depend on the specific educational environments, such as their ability group, students enter. Ability grouping creates distinct educational environments with new opportunities for learning experiences, comparisons, peer group compositions, and performance standards, potentially leading to divergent self-efficacy trajectories over time. By following students across multiple measurement points before and after the educational transition, this study examines the development in the three domains of self-efficacy and determines whether ability grouping is associated with different initial levels of and different developmental trajectories of self-efficacy. Through its longitudinal nature, this study investigates how academic, social, and emotional self-efficacy develop, while also highlighting how educational contexts may differentially shape students’ academic, social, and emotional self-efficacy during the transition to secondary education. Understanding whether and how ability grouping is associated with changes in domains of self-efficacy adds to how structural features of educational systems may contribute to accumulating advantages or disadvantages in adolescents’ development.