Program Profile: STEP (School Transitional Environment Program)

This is a school-based program designed to improve the ease of students’ transition from elementary to middle or junior high school and address problem behavior. The program is rated Promising. Treatment group students demonstrated a statistically significant lower level of school transition stress, behavior problems, and psychological distress, and higher grade point averages, academic expectations, and improved classroom behaviors, compared with control group students.

A Promising rating implies that implementing the program may result in the intended outcome(s).

This program's rating is based on evidence that includes either 1) one study conducted in multiple sites; or 2) two or three studies, each conducted at a different site. Learn about how we make the multisite determination.

Program Goals

STEP (School Transitional Environment Program) is a school organizational change initiative that seeks to decrease student anonymity, increase accountability, and enhance students’ abilities to learn school rules and expectations. The program proposes that improving the transitional learning environment will provide a better educational foundation for students’ middle school and junior high school years. The program’s goals are to reduce barriers to students’ access of formal support, increase availability and accessibility of support, help students access information about school rules and expectations, and increase their sense of belonging and familiarity with teachers.

Program Components/Target Population

The program targets students in transition from elementary and middle schools to large urban junior high and high schools with multiple feeder schools, serving predominantly nonwhite lower-income youths. Its two major components involve restructuring the physical and social environment of the middle school and restructuring the role of the homeroom teacher.

The school’s social system is reorganized by creating smaller learning environments within larger schools, which results in a stable set of classmates for transitioning students. This reduces the degree of complexity and change facing young students entering a new learning environment. Students remain in small groups for their homeroom periods and academic subjects (the classrooms are physically close).

Homeroom teachers act as administrators and guidance counselors, providing class schedule assistance, academic counseling, and counseling for personal problems. Teachers also explain the project to parents and notify them of student absences. Project students are assigned to homerooms in which all classmates are STEP participants. They are enrolled in the same core classes to help develop stable peer groups and enhance participants’ familiarity with the school.

Study 1

The Felner and colleagues (1993) study used a two-group quasi-experiment design comparing four schools that implemented STEP (School Transitional Environment Program) with four control schools. The sample consisted of 1,204 STEP students and 761 students in non-STEP comparison schools. The overall sample included 17 percent minority populations, with 44 percent of participants from households in which high school completion was the highest level of parental education attained. Participants included all non-special education students in treatment and control schools and were statistically similar in demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. Expenditure per pupil was also statistically similar in both treatment and control schools. The researchers noted the principal difference was in school size: on average, treatment schools were larger than control schools (880 pupils for treatment schools and 434 for comparison schools) and had more feeder schools. Since larger schools likely have greater peer group flux and complexity, the differences in school sizes between treatment and control groups were likely to work against any findings of positive effects for STEP.

The authors used a series of standardized measures and teacher observations to assess school transition stress; psychological distress, depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem; behavior problems; academic expectations; and classroom behavior adaptation. The measurements were conducted at the end of the students’ second year from the time of their transition. Multiple analyses of variance (MANOVAs) and subsequent univariate analysis of variance (ANOVA) procedures were employed to measure differences between the two groups. Subgroup analyses were not conducted.

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

These sources were used in the development of the program profile: