A young person's sense of belonging at school can affect their level of motivation, academic achievement and wellbeing. During the transition from primary to secondary school, one's sense of belonging may be affected by the changes and challenges encountered. This paper reports some of the findings from a larger qualitative longitudinal study that…

In Australia and many other countries, the provision of the healthiest possible start in life for all children has been a priority for government. Evidence to support the importance of the early years for future development has accumulated over the past two decades [1]. Patterns of childhood development predict health, wellbeing, learning and…

The aim of this study is to develop a multidimensional measure for assessing children's personal agency to handle parental conflict through their coping self-efficacy beliefs (Bandura, 1997). Coping self-efficacy beliefs are individuals' perceived ability to motivate themselves, access cognitive resources, and perform the actions required to take…

Adolescence is a time of great physical, emotional and social development complicated by a key organisational change in schooling. This study investigated what young people in primary school reported being worried about with their impending move to secondary school, and how their expectations of the transition experience predicted their actual…

School belonging, measured as a unidimensional construct, is an important predictor of negative affective problems in adolescents, including depression and anxiety symptoms. A recent study found that one such measure, the Psychological Sense of School Membership scale, actually comprises three factors: Caring Relations, Acceptance, and Rejection.…

In the current study, we tested whether school connectedness mediates more distal deficits in social skills in influencing depressive symptoms in a sample of 127 sixth- and seventh-grade students. Results demonstrated that school connectedness and social skills accounted for 44% and 26% of variance in depressive symptoms respectively and 49% in a…

Judgments about the quality of students' experience of school generally focus on their academic performance and indeed this is an important indicator but closer attention needs to be paid to equally important, more broadly based outcomes that include social/emotional adjustment as they also are shown to impact on students' lives at, and beyond…