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…

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…

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…

We examined classrooms as complex systems that affect students' literacy learning through interacting effects of content and amount of time individual students spent in literacy instruction along with the global quality of the classroom learning environment. We observed 27 3rd-grade classrooms serving 315 target students using 2 different…

Changes in the demands posed by increasingly complex workplaces in the 21st century have raised the importance of nonroutine skills such as complex problem solving (CPS). However, little is known about the antecedents and outcomes of CPS, especially with regard to malleable external factors such as classroom climate. To investigate the relations…

Fourth- and fifth-grade students' motivation and engagement during classroom discussions were investigated in 2 studies. Study 1 examined students' moment-by-moment engagement during collaborative peer-managed small-group discussions in comparison to conventional teacher-managed whole-class discussions. Study 2 evaluated the long term effects of…