While female students are more successful and show more behavioural engagement at school than male students, they also report lower levels of subjective well-being. This study examines how motivational regulation interacts with school engagement in predicting subjective well-being of male and female students. In questionnaire data from a…

Having a low sense of belonging in secondary education is associated with feelings of social alienation, lower school performance, and dropping out early. Based on person-environment fit theory, we expect retained students to experience a misfit with their academic environment. This experience could intensify when there are fewer other retained…

In explaining why girls outperform boys in school, some studies focus on individual gender-identity. Others stress the interactional dimension of students exerting pressure to act in a more masculine/feminine way. Still other research examines the development of student cultures in specific school contexts. Considering the gender structure, this…

Previous studies on the impact of grade retention on academic self-concept suffer from inconclusive findings. There is no consensus if retention yields long-term benefits that could offset its opportunity costs and, if so, under what conditions. Therefore, this article examines whether grade retention decreases academic self-concept and whether…

School discipline research has demonstrated that the labeling of student behaviors as requiring disciplinary action is a selective process in which school staff take into account other factors than the characteristics of the behaviors. We argue that school staff react in a disciplinary way to students with negative attitudes toward the educational…

This study examines whether the gender difference in sense of academic futility is related to the proportion of girls attending a school. We argue that the more progressive gender role culture in schools with a higher proportion of girls might influence especially boys' sense of futility. Multilevel analyses of data gathered in 2014 from 5,162…

This study assesses the effect of secondary schools' sex-composition on boys' and girls' felt pressure for gender-conformity. Whereas gender-conformity pressure affects adolescents' well-being, little large-scale research examines school features' influence. Multilevel-analyses are conducted on representative Flemish data of first grade students,…

Ethnic discrimination is a serious problem in education. Previous quantitative research is predominately focused on the consequences of ethnic discrimination. Very little is known, however, about the characteristics of the school context that influence the initial experience of ethnic discrimination. This knowledge is essential to support schools…

Background/Context: As a result of migration processes, schools in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium) are notably ethnically diverse. This evolution has coincided with an increasing number of studies focusing on ethnic-minority pupils' experiences of ethnic prejudice from their ethnic majority counterparts. Purpose/Objective/Research…

This study examines whether secondary schools' gender composition and levels of laddish attitudes influence the degree of ethnic prejudice among Flemish pupils. We hypothesize that in addition to pupil-level predictors of prejudice, the school's gender composition and its laddish culture play roles in pupils' attitudes toward ethnic minorities. We…

Transferring to another school or leaving the educational system altogether has considerable consequences not only for the student who makes the decision to leave, but also for the students who stay behind. This paper aims to investigate the effects of secondary schools' mobility and dropout rates on the levels of school engagement in the…

Track position has an impact on students' perceptions of educational success. These perceptions matter as they relate to educational and professional aspirations and choices. In this ethnographic study, based on ethnographic observations and semi-structured interviews in three secondary schools in Flanders (northern part of Belgium), we want to…

While research has focused on the role of racism in (re)producing ethnic/racial inequalities in education, there is very little research that investigates how variability in minority students' responses to racism can be explained. By using an ecological approach to integrate existing research on actors' responses to racism, this study finds that…

Educational gender gap research tries to explain the differential achievement of boys and girls at secondary school, which manifests in many western countries. Several explanatory frameworks are used for this purpose, such as masculinities theory. In this review article, the history of educational gender gap research in Anglo-Saxon literature and…

Teacher recommendations are an important factor in the process of track placement, but research has shown that they are biased by pupils' social background. Pupils from higher socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to get the advice to enrol in an academic track than pupils from lower socio-economic backgrounds, irrespective of prior…