From Secondary to Higher Education: The Influence of Social-Emotional Learning During Educational Transition
We have all been there, that big moment, switching from the safe grounds of secondary education to a whole other world: higher education. This involves, as us duchies call it, HBO (University of Applied Sciences) and university (academic). It doesn’t really matter which of these two you end up with, it requires a lot of resilience from us to make such a big step, and at that time, none of us might have truly felt ready at that time to make it.
Yet you did, and you most likely can remember very specific things about that experience. Think back at your first few weeks at higher education, was there a moment you felt like giving up? Or was there someone around you struggling with a similar feeling? How about your entire first year at higher education? Well, spoiler alert: you are not alone. It appears that roughly 30% of all first-year students drop out during their first year in higher education. Students that dropped out reported something interesting; it was not mainly the lesson format that made them decide to quit, it was their need for social-emotional support that remained unseen.
It is a pity to see that schools tend to go and change their lessons and curricula in order to try to decrease the number of dropouts, while students state that this is often not the most important factor. The need for social-emotional support is related to a process that every student is going through: Social-Emotional Learning (SEL). As you can see in figure 1. SEL contains five different categories.
The four phases of the secondary/higher education transition
SEL plays an important role during the transition from secondary education to higher education, and this particular transition appears to have different phases: preparation, encounter, adjustment, and stabilization.
Let me quickly first explain these phases to you.
The preparation phase is not much different than the name tells you. You are preparing to go to higher education and all that comes with it. This includes choosing a new school when you are in your graduation year of secondary education, maybe moving out to live closer to your new school, buying all sorts of stuff you need for studying, and most importantly trying to get your mindset into brand new student life. Then there is the encounter phase, in which you try to make sense of everything that is new. This phase refers to you in the first few weeks at your new school. You can’t find the lecture rooms, everyone is walking by you at a fast pace, buildings seem to get bigger and bigger the longer you look at them, and your brain is working very hard not to forget your own name. Don’t worry (like the term says) it is only a phase. After these weeks you transition into the adjustment phase. Everything in your new school is still quite overwhelming for you, but you made your first steps and you’re now ready to adjust yourself and make the unfamiliar your new familiar. Lastly, you end up in the stabilization phase. You’re almost done with the awfully stressful transition process and have now collected everything you needed to take your unique place in the educational world you entered months ago. You met new people, made friends, challenged yourself to face and overcome challenges along the way and have created a personal foundation to fall back on, whatever may happen in your future study years.
The influence of SEL and the connection to the transitional phases
Now, back to the link between the transition phases and the SEL categories. What if the SEL categories and the transition phases have some kind of overlap? Then we could get some answers about what schools can do best to support their first-year students in their social emotional development.
This was worth diving into tons of literature for, which brought me to writing an article with the following objective:
Examine the influence of SEL on the transition from secondary education to higher education and connect the SEL categories to the different transitional phases.
The study I performed is called a systematic review, which means I searched through various databases to find articles about SEL and the transition from secondary to higher education. The highlights from these articles are put together, which creates an overview of the studies about this topic that have been performed in the past decade.
Now the question is: what did we find? We searched for everything that could help us clarify if there was a possible connection to make between the different SEL categories and the phases of transition. And we are quite confident to say there is. To keep the overview, we are going to break this thing up in pieces.
Self-Awareness
It appears that regulating your own emotions plays a major role in being able to cope with stress. This means that if you do not know how to stay in control of your own emotions, you could run into problems when you face challenges that you must solve to continue your study. The same goes for self-efficacy, which is you genuinely believing in your own capabilities. Experiencing troubles with believing in yourself might result in low levels of motivation and cause problems with keeping up with your studies. You can imagine that things like low motivation and an accumulation of challenges increase the chances of dropping out in your first year. Thus, Self-Awareness helps you to prepare for your transition to higher education.
Self-Management
The emotions and behavior you learn to recognize and control in Self-Awareness are important for Self-Management, because here you are going to use these skills to achieve your goals. When you join your new school, you might have certain expectations of what it will be like to study there. If these expectations do not match the reality of studying, you have to recalibrate in order to still reach your goal. But if the emotions take over and you do not know how to handle your challenges, your goal might vanish in your head, resulting in low intrinsic motivation. This intrinsic motivation is crucial to keeping your study going. If you do not feel the purpose of it anymore, then even a teacher that is telling you hundreds of times that ‘you can do this’, might not be able to fully convince you that you actually can. Thus, Self-Management occurs in the encounter phase and controlling your emotions and behavior helps you to make sense of everything and to stick to your goals.
Social Awareness
A new school means a new social identity. This is a big deal, because who are you as a student? Developing this identity requires you to adapt yourself to all that has changed or will change in the future. You will face social dynamics that will offer you valuable friendships if you are able to create your social identity. In these social dynamics you are going to use your own understanding of emotions and behavior to empathize and connect with others, even if your cultures are completely different. This will help you to form relationships with others and to create your own group of people you want to involve in your (student) life. You might already imagine how important this skill is, because if you cannot find ‘your place’ in the new social setting of students it might get hard to connect with others. Social Awareness forms the bridge between the encounter phase to the adjustment phase. You are making sense of new things, and you will use this to adapt yourself to your new surroundings.
Relationship Skills
If you were able to empathize with other students, you have taken your first step in building new friendships and connections. Being among other students that you can relate to most likely gives you the feeling that you belong. This sense of belonging is very important for student wellbeing and has a positive influence on your study success and those of others. The relationships you have with students, teachers and other school staff provides you with the opportunity to study together, ask questions, talk whenever you feel like talking, having a good time, and so on. It makes or breaks the life of a student. You can imagine that no sense of belonging could increase the feeling that continuing to study makes no sense. These Relationship Skills take the biggest part of the adjustment phase, because you will use this to find your place in the academic world.
Responsible Decision-Making
This last category of SEL might be the most important one, because it determines the way you will enter your next study years. This category is at the end of your transition process and, at this stage, you likely have collected a lot of experiences and impressions as a first-year student. Now, if you feel competent about the other four skills of SEL, experienced positive things in your first year, faced and solved your challenges as a student and as a person, and feel you could sufficiently work on your future goals, well than you might have had an amazing year. You will take these good vibes with you to your subsequent study years, and you might not really fear whatever is waiting for you because you proved to yourself that you can handle it. But for those who found this first year more challenging, and that do not feel competent about everything that considers SEL, they might have liked a little support while experiencing these struggles. This shows how much is happening during your first year, how much energy it takes from you, and how horrifyingly much it decides for you how confidently you feel when going into your next study years. This category of SEL is related to the stabilization phase. Your entire first year, and all that comes with it, is going to help you stabilize, or in the case of negative experiences; it will make it more difficult to stabilize.
All in all, we can say we found interesting insights that absolutely deserve further research. It is important to keep thinking about ways to improve the support for students regarding social emotional development during the transition to higher education. This could help us reduce the amount of drop-outs and give every student that fair chance on having success on both a professional and personal level.
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