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…

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…

The present study concurrently analyzed risk and protective factors on the individual and the class level related to bullying and victimization in ethnically diverse schools. The sample derived from the pre-test data of a national intervention evaluation study in Austria (ViSC) and comprised 1,450 students (48.8% girls) aged 11-15 (M = 12.31) from…