Educational Identity Development in Adolescence: Longitudinal Trajectories and the Role of Educational and Family Contexts

Educational identity development is an important undertaking during adolescence, with school and parental influences shaping how students approach it. Using secondary data from three longitudinal projects (N = 3,217, Mage = 17.29, SDage = 1.14, 57% female), this study investigated how adolescents construct their educational identities in relation to key influences within educational contexts. To this end, cohort membership, academic tracking, school prestige, and parental education were analyzed as predictors of adolescents’ educational identity trajectories. Performance on the Baccalaureate exam was investigated as a distal outcome related to adolescents’ identity trajectories. By employing latent class growth analyses, we uncovered four distinct educational identity trajectories: achieved, moratorium, foreclosure, and diffusion. Cohort membership and track placement, but not school prestige, significantly predicted trajectory membership. Adolescents from the oldest cohort were more likely to express high confidence and reduced doubts about their education (i.e., achieved and foreclosure), compared to the more recent cohort. Adolescents from work-bound tracks were more likely to follow achieved or moratorium trajectories, compared to those from university-bound tracks. Trajectories also differed in Baccalaureate performance. The foreclosed trajectory displayed the highest Baccalaureate mean in comparison to the achieved and moratorium trajectories. Together, the results underscore the idea that adolescents construct their educational identities in response to external demands, with educational systems playing an important role in providing support for adaptive identity development.