This chapter describes a qualitative study investigating how student-teacher relationships intersect with school climate in an urban middle school. Findings indicate that care is at the center of the relationships, which establishes a climate in the school that teachers describe as having a "family atmosphere." The implications of this…

Exposure to violence (ETV) poses a serious threat to adolescents' safety and well-being; however, some adolescents who grow up in such toxic environments are able to thrive due to a combination of internal and external characteristics. The current study examines the role of cohesion across contexts (i.e., family, school, and community) as…

Advances in multilevel modeling techniques now make it possible to investigate the psychometric properties of instruments using clustered data. Factor models that overlook the clustering effect can lead to underestimated standard errors, incorrect parameter estimates, and model fit indices. In addition, factor structures may differ depending on…

This article explores the way in which values education is incorporated in the Life Orientation (LO) curriculum of the Senior Phase (Grades 7-9) in South Africa. Researchers agree that in the light of the current need to regenerate morals and re-norm the nation, values are critical. From the moment they are born, children learn by observing…

New evidence builds upon the Student Engagement IndexTM and Teacher Engagement IndexTM research (Scott-Webber, Konyndyk, & French, 2019; Scott-Webber, Konyndyk, French, & French, 2018; Scott-Webber, Konyndyk, French, Lembke, & Kinney, 2017) determining post-occupancy answers to, "Can we demonstrate that the design of the built…

Because many school districts receive funding based on student attendance, absenteeism results in a high cost for the public education system. This study shows the direct links between bias-based bullying, school absenteeism because of feeling unsafe at school, and loss of funds for school districts in California. Data from the 2011-2013…

This study adopted a cross-sectional and correlational research design in an attempt to add our understanding of student- and teacher-level factors that help explain variability in students' science achievement to the existing literature. More specifically, the present article examined students' science achievement in relation to their…

In order to investigate the effectiveness of using Student Response Systems (SRS) among grade 7 and 8 science students in New York, the How Do You Feel About This Class? (HDYFATC) questionnaire was administered to 1097 students (532 students did use SRS and 565 students who did not use SRS). Data analyses attested to the sound factorial validity…

Data from the School Crime Supplement (SCS) to the National Crime Victimization Survey (2013), a nationally representative sample survey of students ages 12 through 18, were used to evaluate co-occurring reports of bullying and other unfavorable conditions at school. Analysis is restricted to those respondents who were enrolled in grades 6 through…

Purpose: In 2017 and 2018, engineering applications and design process were given weight to with the updates carried out in the Physical Sciences Lesson Curriculum in Turkey. For the STEM education which is at the center of this update to reach its target, it is highly important that students accurately learn what engineers do, what their work…

Teaching middle school mathematics, I have found that classroom dynamics have a profound impact on the quality of mathematical discussion. Wanting to improve classroom discussion in order to better facilitate both small-group and student-driven learning, I started the school year by randomly grouping students every week for their small groups. I…

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…

This article uses a critical sociohistorical lens to discuss and explain examples of the ways in which young people reflect, refract, and contribute to discourses of gentrification, displacement, and racial, ethnic, and geographic community identity building in a rapidly changing urban neighborhood. The article explores examples from open-ended…

Classroom activities aimed at changing students' identity-based motivation (IBM) improve student outcomes by helping students experience school as the path to their adult future identities and their difficulties along the way as signals of the importance of schoolwork. One way to scale these effects would be to have teachers deliver IBM…

Recent research indicates that the development of antisocial behavior among students is influenced by the behavioral characteristics of their classmates. However, not all peers in a given class may exert the same influence. Thus, we examined the extent to which individual development is predicted by the perceived proportion of all students with…