Assessment of primary school pupils' expectations concerning transition to secondary school Stefanie Leffelsend Universität Dortmund, Institute of School Development Research In Germany the transition from primary to secondary school takes place after the fourth school-year. In comparison to primary school in secondary school children become separated in more achievement- homogeneous learning-groups. Therefore school-transition is of great importance for the children. However, school- transition also implies many changes which are not related to achievement, as for example a new social environment with unknown classmates and teachers or an unfamiliar organization of school-life. This means, children have to adapt to new conditions by changing their behaviour on the one hand and by assimilating their cognitive concepts both concerning school and themselves as a pupil on the other hand. So the transition can be seen as a critical live-event. Because nearly all children experience this transition at the end of the fourth term, it is a so called "normative event", and that is to say, it is possible for the pupils to form expectations concerning their future life in school. These expectations are emotional: they can be positive as pleasant anticipation, but they also can be negative by being afraid of the new school. However, some children will connect school-transition with ambivalent emotions and experience a mix of positive and negative emotions at the same time. And finally there will be children with indifferent expectations, who report only low emotions in both positive and negative direction.In order to assess these emotional expectations we developed an instrument, which is based on a collection of transition-specific situations. These situations were collected from interviews with fourth-graders and teachers as well as from relevant literature. In our questionnaire pupils were asked a) if they expect this situation at their new school (0=no 1=yes), b) how much they would like this situation to come true (0=would not like it, 1=would like it a little, 2=would like it very much), and c) how much they would be afraid of this situation to come true (0=would not be afraid, 1=would be a little afraid, 2=would be very afraid). By summing up the scores for positive anticipation over all situations which are expected to come true we get an index for pleasant anticipation concerning transition. By summing up the scores for anxiety over all anticipated situations we get an index for negative concern. This means, we assessed anticipation and concern of transition in analogy to an expectancy-value-model as it is often used in attitude- research. We used our questionnaire in an investigation with 337 fourth-graders from nine primary schools. Our first aim was to assess the validity of the questionnaire. Therefore we added four scales for measuring motivation to attend school, social insecurity, fear of achievement-situations and academic self-concept. Correlations support our validity-assumption. In a second study we asked 30 teachers as experts to evaluate the questionnaire. The results underline the usefulness of our instrument for further research as do the results of a further study with 30 fourth-graders for assessing the instruments retest-reliability. Furthermore we had a closer look on the individual scores in order to describe the pupils' expectations. As a main result we revealed higher scores in pleasant anticipation than in negative concern. However, we also found significant differences between the different forms of secondary schools. Pupils going to attend the Hauptschule expressed more negative concern about school environment, achievement expectations and social relations to their schoolmates than pupils who will attend the Gymnasium. Further descriptive results are presented in this talk.