Nearly all college students require some academic assistance throughout their learning experiences. Rather than a dependent act, help-seeking is a self-regulated and motivated strategy; however, there are mixed findings regarding the relationship between academic help-seeking and academic achievement. Thus, the current study used meta-analytic…

The effectiveness of an experimental middle school fraction intervention was evaluated. The intervention was centered on the number line and incorporated key principles from the science of learning. Sixth graders (N = 51) who struggled with fraction concepts were randomly assigned at the student level to the experimental intervention (n = 28) or…

According to social referencing theory, cues peers take from positive and negative teacher behavior toward a student affect the student's peer liking and disliking status. The present study was the first to test the hypothesized mediation model connecting teacher behavior with peer liking and disliking status, via peer perceptions of teacher…

Using data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, this study examined the cross-lagged relations between behavioral engagement and reading achievement in elementary school and whether these cross-lagged relations differed between low-socioeconomic status (SES) and mid-…

There is little data on whether school discipline or juvenile justice sanctions are directed disproportionately toward sexual minority youth (e.g., lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning; LGBQ) compared with heterosexual youth and even less on factors that may relate to such disparities. We tested for sexual orientation-based disparities in school…

In order to battle bullying, it can be important for students to have teachers whom they see as taking an active stand against bullying in terms of propagating antibullying norms and having an efficacious approach to decreasing bullying. This expectation was tested with data from the control schools of the Finnish evaluation of the KiVa…

While the roles of student misbehavior and teacher self-efficacy in teacher burnout have been investigated, there is still a pressing need to determine the processes involved and the degree to which these generalize across early career teachers. The present research integrates findings on teacher self-efficacy, occupational stressors, and…

Receiving report card grades is psychologically salient to most students and can elicit a range of affective reactions. A 3-wave longitudinal study examined how grades shape students' (N = 375; M age at Wave 1 = 12.6 years) school engagement through the affective reactions they elicit. Emotional and behavioral engagement were measured at the start…

This study investigates whether a common set of student attitudes and behavioral tendencies can account for academic achievement across different, especially high-performing, countries via analysis of the PISA 2009 international data set. The 13 countries examined are 5 of the top-performing Eastern countries/systems, namely Shanghai China, South…

Guided by an ecological theoretical model, the authors used a series of multilevel models to examine associations among children's individual problem behavior, the classroom behavioral context, and school readiness outcomes for a cohort of low-income children (N = 3,861) enrolled in 229 urban Head Start classrooms. Associations were examined…

Changes in motivation anticipate changes in engagement, but the present study tested the reciprocal relation that changes in students' classroom engagement lead to corresponding longitudinal changes in their classroom motivation. Achievement scores and multiple measures of students' course-specific motivation (psychological need satisfaction,…

The focus of this study was to prospectively investigate the effect of aggressive behavior and of classroom behavioral context, as measured in the fall of 1st grade, on the timing of 1st school removal across Grades 1-7 in a sample of predominately urban minority youths from Baltimore, Maryland. Using a multilevel discrete-time survival framework,…

The authors of this study sought to examine the relationships among teachers' years of experience, teacher characteristics (gender and teaching level), three domains of self-efficacy (instructional strategies, classroom management, and student engagement), two types of job stress (workload and classroom stress), and job satisfaction with a sample…

Four studies present the validation of a self-report scale capturing "academic entitlement," which is defined as the tendency to possess an expectation of academic success without a sense of personal responsibility for achieving that success. The Academic Entitlement scale possesses a 2-factor structure (Study 1); 10 items measure students'…

A positive school climate is an important component of successful and effective schools and thus is often an aim of schoolwide initiatives. Climate has traditionally been conceptualized as a school-level factor and is often assumed to be related to other school-level factors (e.g., school size). The current study examines variation in perceptions…