Stage-Environment Fit Theory

History

Descriptions of SEF theory first appeared in 1989, in a book chapter by Jacquelynne S. Eccles and Carol Midgley (1989), and later (in 1993), in an American Psychologist article that included the full cohort of scholars at the University of Michigan who had been involved with the theory's development (Eccles et al., 1993). The theory was originally derived from ideas about how the “fit” or “mismatch” between characteristics of individuals and characteristics of their social settings conjointly influence the quality of individuals' psychological and behavioral functioning in those settings (Hunt, 1975; Lewin, 1935). Hunt (1975), in particular, had applied these ideas to the educational process and had cast them into a developmental framework. Specifically, he suggested that educators were responsible for drawing forth young people's cognitive and social development along certain developmental lines (defined by the curricula and purposes of schooling, respectively) and proposed that educators could achieve these aims most effectively with their students by continually providing them with educational opportunities that were attuned to their developmental capacities and needs at different ages. Hunt's “developmentalization” of the notion of optimal person-environment fit and his application of this perspective to issues of pedagogy was a key theoretical idea undergirding the development of SEF theory (Eccles & Midgley, 1989, p. 175).

Eccles and Midgley (1989) elaborated on these ideas and applied them to an intellectual dialogue among a multidisciplinary community of scholars who were interested in “the effect of the transition from elementary to middle or junior high school on early adolescent development” (Eccles & Midgley, 1989, p. 139). Specifically, they applied these ideas to the question of why the transition into a new school between Grades 6 and 7 seemed to be linked to a variety of negative changes in indicators of motivation to learn among many, though not all, early adolescents. Drawing upon Hunt's (1975) work, Eccles and Midgley conjectured that if it were true that optimal educational environments were those that met the needs of young people at different ages, then the converse was also true: that suboptimal educational environments were those that failed to meet the needs of youth at particular ages by being understimulating and unsupportive socially. This “mismatch” of environment with developmental needs, they hypothesized, might account for some of the declines in academic motivation that had been found among many young people as they moved into a middle or junior high school setting.

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