Transition from Elementary to Lower Secondary School (which in Austria occurs after 4th grade of ES) constitutes an important critical event (Filipp, 2007) in students´ life (Lohaus, Elben, Ball & Klein-Hessling, 2004; Meckelmann, 2004; Sirsch, 2003; Valtin & Wagner, 2004). Individual as well as family related factors play a role in students´ way of coping with this transition. As Sirsch (2003) showed in a study of about 800 students in their last year of ES, even the impending transition has its impact on children depending on their perceiving it either as a challenge or a threat. In the present paper, the effects of school transition are studied after students´ had already attended the new school for one term, using the data of the longitudinal study “Family development in the course of life” (FIL, Rollett & Werneck, 2008). This study began when the mothers were in their 6th month of pregnancy and originally included 175 families (waves: t1 = pregnancy, t2 = child´s age 3 months, t3 = 3 years, t4 = 8 years, t5 = 11 years). The general aim of the analysis presented here therefore is to investigate long-term influences on coping with school transition. It can be conjectured that on the parents´ side an atmosphere in the family tainted by parental conflict and an unfavourable parenting style present risk factors for childrens´ coping effectively with the transition from ES to LSS, while on the students´ side, early temperament, intelligence, readiness to invest into scholastic achievement, individual personality (characterized either by neuroticism or extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness respectively) and a positive in contrast to a negative attachment to parents constitute important factors influencing coping with school transition.

In order to identify longitudinal trajectories of effective coping, we divided the sample into a group of students with deteriorating grades (Group 1) and another with constant or improved grades after their first term in LSS as compared to their last grades in ES (Group 2) and separately conducted PLS path analysis (Wold, 1979, Lohmöller, 1987) for each group. As a target variable, the latent variable “Coping with School Transition at t5” including the manifest variables Coping/Organisational Domain, Coping/Academic Domain and Coping/Social Domain was generated to reflect the combined impact of the various aspects of coping with school transition.

In Group 1 39% and in Group 2 73% of the variance could be explained by the variables in the models. As the direct paths showed, a negative temperament at t2 (path coefficient: -.22) and academic effort avoidance at t5 (-35) proofed to be risk factors for coping effectively with the transition to LSS in Group 1, while positive NEO-FFI personality traits (t5/.43) and to a lesser degree intelligence (t4/.16), positive parenting (t4/.15) and positive attachment (t5/.12) furthered coping. In Group 2, parental conflict (t4/-.19) and a strict parenting style (t4/-.27) constituted risk factors, while intelligence (t4/.40) and especially a positive attachment to parents (t5/.74) played major roles in successfully coping with the transition. In both models, the mediated paths further elucidated the differences in the structures of the causal pathways typical for the coping characteristics of the two groups.