Findings and resources prepared by the Ad Hoc Committee on Preparing Children for the Transition to Middle School

At its meeting in October 2005, the PTO decided to form a committee to study the issues surrounding the transition to middle school and what we as parents might be able to do to make it easier for our children.

While the original question revolved around planning workshops for 5th grade students, the committee decided to take a broader look at the issues and see what might be done to improve the situation – starting earlier in elementary school, during the months just before kids go to middle school, and during their first year at Tappan.

To see our consensus statement and preliminary findings, read our January 2006 Golden Apple grant application package [PDF: 148K – download].

Listed below are some of the resources we’ve identified that have helped us understand what is going on during the transition, what the risks are, and what might be done. (Listing here is not an endorsement of a particular site or study.) Many thanks to Sue Burke for a number of the web site listings. Please let us know of other valuable resources!

Links on the web:

• Tappan Middle School home page – no transition information, but gives basic information about schedules, departments, staff, and basic rules.
• AAPS Middle School Student Services Guide [PDF: 644K – download] Acrobat file with mostly district-wide middle school philosophy and curriculum information.
• National Middle School Association – Intended for educators, this site does have useful information and summaries of research on the transition to middle school.
• Public School Parents Network – section on middle school. Links to a variety of web-based resources.
• PBS Kids "Its My Life" section on starting middle school – advice, stories and discussion questions for kids about to graduate to middle school.
• Girls Empowered – organization suggested to provide workshops for 5th grade girls here. Offers workshops for kids and for parents & teachers.
• Raising Strong and Confident Daughters – Carole Lapidos and Sally Wisotzkey. Lapidos gave PTO- and CDC-sponsored workshops on raising girls and boys a couple of years ago.
  • Helped organize the "It’s Great to be a Girl" mentoring program, along with several UM units and the Huron Valley Girls Scouts. UM undergraduate women run workshops for girls at middle schools in Ypsilanti and Canton. See the program description on the OAMI site; the course description in the Sociology Dept, and an article about the program from the Univ Record.
• Articles on the web
  • "Student perceptions of the transition from elementary to middle school" by Patrick Akos, from Professional School Counseling, June 2002 (links to ad-free printable version).
  • "Making the Transition from Fifth to Sixth Grade" – collection of advice on organizing transition activities from a discussion list organized by MiddleWeb, a web site focusing on middle school reform.
  • "Transition to Middle School: Are Swirlies for Real?" by Peter Lorain. From the NEA webiste; advice on how to handle the transition from an educator’s point of view.

Articles in our archive

Articles listed here can be difficult to find on the web but were made available freely on the internet. We’ve saved copies on our server for easier downloading. Copyright remains with the original author or publisher. Documents require the free Adobe Reader.

• "The Transition to Middle School", Donna Schumacher, ERIC Digest (June 1998). Document EDO-PS-98-6. 2pp. [PDF: 22K – download]
  A very condensed but useful summary of the literature on the transition to middle school, from an educator’s and administrator’s point of view.

• "Transition into Middle School", Emmnett Mullins & Judith Irvin, Middle School Journal vol 31 no 3 (January 2000). 6pp. [PDF: 51K – download]
  Helpful, and more detailed, review of the main strands of the literature and their implications for middle school transition.

• "Facilitating Student Transitions into Middle School", Marie Shoffner & Ronald Williamson, Middle School Journal vol 31 no 4 (March 2000). 8 pp. [PDF: 56K – download]
  A kind of "best practices" guide to managing the transition to middle school for teachers and administrators of both elementary and middle schools.

• "School Reform and the Transition to Middle School", Eric Anderman, Martin Maehr & Carol Midgley (April 1996). Document ED 396 440. 36pp. [PDF: 633K – download]
  Conference paper outlining an intervention study in several Michigan schools which aimed to test the effect of changing "goal orientation" on student success in the transition. They examined the effect of shifting from an "ability" orientation to a "task/mastery" orientation, and found that the latter helped students adjust better.

• "Present and Possible Selves Across the Transition to Middle Grades School", Eric Anderman, Lynley Hicks & Martin Maehr (February 1994). Document ED 396 193. 10pp. [PDF: 137K – download]
  An earlier conference paper in which the ideas on goal orientations, tested in the 1996 paper, were developed.

• "A Needs Assessment of Fifth Grade Students in a Middle School", Amy Diemert (1992). Document ED 362 332. 60pp. [PDF: 1.9Mb – download]
  Research paper with an extremely small-n study of how students in a middle school identified their needs and whether they were getting adult help with them.