Students' academic engagement is greatly informed by a classroom's social climate. However, more research is needed regarding how specific peer behavior, especially prosocial behavior, come to shape academic engagement. The present study investigated whether students' perceptions about their classmates' prosocial behavior were associated with…

Introduction: Leadership support has been identified as a key facilitator to successful implementation of school-based initiatives. School leadership contributions to student academic success and school reform have been documented, but less work has focused on the effects of leadership on school mental health initiatives such as social, emotional,…

In this study, we identified the specific discipline decision situations (i.e., vulnerable decision points [VDPs]) that contribute most to racial discipline disparities from a sample of 2020 schools across the United States. We also examined how much VDPs contributed to overall discipline disparities and the extent which there was similarity among…

This study utilized latent profile analysis (LPA) to examine patterns of principal stress and coping and its relations with principal (n = 125), teacher (n = 3671), and student (n = 19,390) outcomes. LPA analysis of school principals based on their reports of stress and coping showed that most principals were classified as having high stress and…

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…

Background: Food insecurity is characterized by limited access to adequate food due to a lack of money or resources (eg, lack of transportation to obtain food). School aged children who are experiencing food insecurity are at greater risk for poor academic outcomes, but previous studies have not examined the effects of food insecurity on specific…

The purpose of this study was to examine parent-teacher congruent perceptions of middle school structures to support parent monitoring of children's behavior. We examined family educational involvement and school's communication and support to families as predictors of congruence, as well as congruence as a predictor of children following school…

This longitudinal, within-subjects study examined whether adolescents' biological sensitivity to socioeconomic status (SES) for emerging social difficulties varied day to day. Diverse adolescents (N = 315; ages 11-18; 57% female; 25% Asian, 18% Latinx, 11% Black) provided daily diaries and saliva samples for 4 days. We measured biological…

This study investigated the utility of including teacher-reported callous-unemotional (CU) behaviors in the assessment of disruptive behaviors in school-based research. Participants included 138 first- and second-grade children (68% male; 76% eligible for free or reduced-price lunch; 61% Black, 9% Latinx, 23% White, and 7% multiracial) who…

Introduction: Effective classroom management is critical to creating a classroom environment in which social, emotional, and academic learning can take place. The present study investigated the association between early career, early elementary teachers' occupational health (job stress, burnout, and perceived teaching ability) and perceptions of…

Extant work on the importance of children's executive function (EF) for academic skills typically employs either direct assessments of EF skills or adult reports of children's EF behaviors. Each approach has advantages, yet few studies have examined how different EF measurement approaches distinctly relate to child outcomes. We examined how direct…

Bullying bystanders' reactions are important for either stopping or perpetuating bullying behaviors. Given school-based bullying programs' focus on bystanders, understanding the associations between school-level factors and individual bystander responses can improve intervention efficacy. Data from 64,670 adolescents were used to examine bullying…

Few published studies have examined the interaction between community violence exposure, academic engagement, and parental involvement, despite theory suggesting that these three domains of development are interrelated during adolescence. This study had two related objectives: (a) to assess the temporal ordering of the relation between community…

Teaching is a uniquely stressful profession. Though previous work has drawn attention to the high levels of burnout teachers report experiencing and its impact on students, comparatively less work has investigated what influences teachers' burnout itself. Guided by Lazarus' (1991) transactional model of stress and coping, the present study…

Introduction: Despite the assumed importance of school-focused possible identities for academic motivation and outcomes, interventions rarely assess the effect of the intervention on possible identities. This may be due to difficulty coding open-ended text at scale but leaves open a number of questions: 1) how do school-focused possible identities…