Promoting prosocial behavior toward those who are dissimilar from oneself is an urgent contemporary issue. Because children spend much time in same-gender relationships, promoting other-gender prosociality could help them develop more inclusive relationships. Our goal in the present research was to better understand the extent to which…

This study examined whether defending and passive bystanding during peer victimization episodes were associated with individual- and classroom-level efficacy to stop peer victimization. Self-report survey data were analyzed from 1,467 Swedish fourth-grade students (mean age = 10.55) from 100 classrooms in 63 schools. Multilevel analyses revealed…

Peer report of aggression has typically been obtained through peer nominations. The purpose of this study was to identify the extent to which peer nominations and peer ratings identified the same children as aggressive and to explore whether the two methods were equally accurate in identifying children at risk for poor social adjustment.…

The purpose of this study is to understand the role of school relationships in shaping students' character development in middle childhood. Students and teachers completed surveys on student-teacher relationships, peer relationships, social-emotional learning (SEL), parent-teacher communication, and character strengths of fairness, hope, bravery,…

The authors, with Swedish elementary school students (N = 201), 9-12 years old, examined the potential significance to self-perceived academic competence of students' cross-ethnic friendship ties and prosocial behavior to better understand education's minority achievement gap. A crossed-lagged panel model was tested to investigate potential…

The present study examined teachers' domain-specific self-efficacy (TSE) in relation to individual students with a variety of social-emotional behaviors in class. Using a sample of 526 third- to sixth-grade students and 69 teachers, multilevel modeling was conducted to examine students' externalizing, internalizing, and prosocial behaviors as…

Previous studies have found that different trajectories of conflicted relationships with teachers predicted academic underachievement. However, little is known about what places children at risk of atypical conflict trajectories. This follow-up study examines whether African American ethnicity, IQ, and socioeconomic status (SES) are unique…

This study examined the differential developmental significance of multiple domains of peer reputation in childhood for current and future competence and symptoms. Participants were 205 children from a normative school cohort who completed assessments in grades 3-6 and then again 10 years later. Through re-analysis of original data from the…

Behavioral descriptors were identified as variant or invariant predictors of perceived popularity in a sample of 516 fourth, fifth, and sixth grade children located in 26 majority-Black or majority-White classrooms. Athletic ability, prosocial behavior, being "cool", social withdrawal, and "personal privilege" (i.e., having a lot of expensive…