Providing freshmen with a good “starting-block”: Two brief social-psychological interventions to promote early adjustment to the first year at university

The transition from secondary to higher education is a challenging experience for most of freshmen. In order to cope with this transition, students have to deal with the characteristics of a new complex environment: new social network, heightened academic demands, autonomous learning and unfamiliar administrative tasks (Perry, Hladkyj, Pekrun, & Pelletier, 2001). Many freshmen struggle with this transition and fail or decide to leave higher education (OECD, 2013), which generates psychological and financial costs for the student, their family and the society (Gale & Parker, 2012). Over the last 20 years, several researchers addressed this major educational issue and a vast body of knowledge has been documented in order to understand the first year at the university (Richardson, Abraham & Bond, 2012). In this vein, the self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000), assert that the fulfillment of the three fundamental needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness are particularly important for student’s adjustment. This assumption has been substantiated by educational literature on higher education which highlighted that autonomous motivation (need for autonomy), self-efficacy beliefs (need for competence), and social integration (need for relatedness) are significant predictors of performance (Richardson et al., 2012). Brief interventions in social psychology also substantiated the importance of feeling competent and related to others (Cohen, Garcia, Apfel & Master, 2006). Yet, such interventions particularly highlighted the temporal importance of the first weeks of transition. The interventions settled during the very first weeks of a transition in new environment could be particularly effective by buffering the participant against initial threats of the new context and by triggering recursive virtuous circle with long term benefits (Walton & Cohen, 2011). This assumption is in line with the transition model of Nicholson (1990), which assert that the transition cycle encompasses with four successive temporal stages: preparation, encounter, adjustment and stabilization. In higher education, encounter stage relates to the first weeks at the university when the freshman is “settling in” the context. Flexible initial beliefs will therefore be settled in stable impressions about the academic context that will determine the way the students will actually tackle the first year (Harris, 2014). Yeager & Walton (2011) emphasized on the importance of the encounter stage in the educational context. The very first weeks at the university are supposed to be key educational juncture, during which the students will confront their expectations and beliefs about the university to the reality (Nicholson, 1990). However, an important limitation of the educational literature is that the importance of the first weeks at university has mainly been disregarded. In this vein, the aim of this study is to assess the actual benefit of promoting student’s adjustment in the first weeks of university. Grounded in self-determination theory, this study will replicate two brief social-psychological interventions in the Belgian educational context. According to social-psychological literature, the interventions specifically focused on the promotion of two of the three fundamental needs: relatedness and competence. The aim of the first intervention, focusing on relatedness, is to hinder the initial apprehension about integration by framing social adversity as transitory and common (Walton & Cohen, 2011). The purpose of the second intervention, focusing on competence need, is to reinforce feeling of competence with self-affirmation task (Napper, Harris & Epton, 2009). Considering that the participants were in a particularly pivotal phase of adjustment, we made the assumption that a subtle change in their perception will have significant impact on their adjustment latter in the year. First intervention is supposed to impact actual student’s integration in the academic context. The second one is assumed to have an impact on actual self-efficacy beliefs several months after the intervention.

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UCLouvainSSH/IPSY - Psychological Sciences Research Institute

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De Clercq, M., Galand, B., & Frenay, M. (2016). Providing freshmen with a good “starting-block”: Two brief social-psychological interventions to promote early adjustment to the first year at university. EARLI SIG-4 conference, Amsterdam. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/185494