School climate is one of the variables that affect academic achievement, but the level of correlation between school climate and academic achievement differs. On the basis of these inconsistent results between school climate and academic achievement, researchers can use meta-analyses to shed light on relevant literature. The present study ran a…

Past research suggests that a sense of belonging to a community is developmentally important for adolescents and affects their engagement in school, especially during the transition to high school. However, little research examines the teaching practices that simultaneously foster classroom belonging and behavioral engagement to create a classroom…

In line with assumptions made by the control-value theory of academic emotions, it was hypothesized that the association between the classroom social environment, in terms of students' perceptions of their teachers' interpersonal behaviour, and students' academic emotions was partially mediated by students' achievement goals. The present study…

Student engagement is a multidimensional construct influenced by complex student, classroom, and school factors. Although prior research has examined various dimensions of student engagement, few studies have adopted a multilevel approach to simultaneously incorporate observational measures of classroom practices with student and school factors.…

Extending conventional value-added models (VAM) of teacher effects that focus on the estimation of average effects for excellence, this study examines "distributive" effects for equity. Using multilevel regression models, the study addresses two research questions to inform educational policy for teacher improvement and accountability.…

The purpose of this study was to better understand the association between teachers' incoming classroom management skills and end-of-year literacy skills of preschool children with or at risk of emotional and behavioral disorders. Furthermore, we explored the contribution of students' incoming engagement and communication skills to end-of-year…

Research has shown that racial/ethnic diversity in elementary schools and classrooms benefits children's academic achievement and feelings of safety and belonging. The current study aimed to expand on existing research by examining associations between classroom racial/ethnic composition and upper elementary children's social-emotional development…

Researchers analyzed data from elementary teachers (N = 233) to further establish the psychometric soundness of the Teacher My Class Inventory-Short Form. Supporting previous psychometric research, confirmatory factor analyses findings supported the factorial validity of the hypothesized five-factor solution. Internal reliability estimates were…

Empirical studies have demonstrated that students who are taught in a group of students with higher average achievement benefit in terms of their achievement. However, there is also evidence showing that being surrounded by high-achieving students has a negative effect on students' academic self-concept, also known as the big-fish--little-pond…

This study examines the general question of how classroom characteristics are linked with differences among students in civic competence, which is seen to be an important basis for political inequality. A resource-mobilisation account of youth civic competence is presented, and this is tested using hierarchical linear modelling and International…

We examined the mediating role of students' interpersonal and academically related social goals in linking students' perceptions of teacher and peer personal and academic emotional supports to their classroom behavior (prosocial, social responsibility) in a sample of young adolescents (n = 3,092) from 7 schools from the mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and…

This study examines the interplay between individual characteristics (social status, provictim attitudes, and family messages about conflict resolution) and classroom descriptive and injunctive norms (peer victimization behaviors and bullying-related beliefs, respectively) in explaining defending behavior. For this purpose, we used a…

Increasingly, reading research has begun to address how students' linguistic environments may explain their reading achievement. In this exploratory analysis, we investigated how the rates of specific instructional talk moves predicted student reading comprehension achievement. Transcripts from third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classrooms (teacher…

Background: To adapt to dramatic changes from physical growth, physical development and the increasing demand of significant others, humor has been found to be an effective coping strategy. However, previous studies have found that adolescents start to express their humor styles with aggressive components which causes negative consequences, such…

Student reports are a common approach to characterizing how students experience their classrooms. We used a recently developed method--multilevel confirmatory factor analysis--to determine whether commonly employed measures of achievement goal structure constructs (mastery and performance) typically verified at the student level can be verified at…