An exploration of placement-related psychosocial influences on school engagement among adolescents in foster care

There is ample evidence that experiencing foster care in childhood often predicts grim outcomes in adulthood, including under-education and resulting poverty and dysfunction. However, little is known about the exact mechanisms through which foster care corrodes academic trajectories, specifically. The current study uses a nationally representative sample of adolescent foster youth (i.e., NSCAW II) to test a model of the influences of placement-related factors on school engagement – namely, foster youth’s perceptions of security in their foster placements, their reports of education-specific involvement by foster caregivers, and the mediating potential of adolescents’ expectations for their future. Results indicate that adolescents’ feelings of “placement security” were linked to their future expectations of positive life outcomes and, ultimately, school engagement. Results also suggest that while educational involvement by foster caregivers was not important for future expectations or social school engagement, it may be related to the more explicitly cognitive aspects of school engagement (i.e., assignment completion, effort, etc.). These findings offer insight into relations between foster care-specific factors and school engagement – a known predictor of academic achievement and eventual educational attainment. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.