Young children bring rich social, cultural, and political knowledge to school, cultivated in their homes and communities. This knowledge, ranging from household skills to multilingual practices, is often marginalized in schools that value different norms. Drawing from ethnographic studies in Illinois and New York kindergarten classrooms, this…

This study examined homophobic name-calling among 2,161 middle school students in the US and found that those who had experienced homophobic name-calling fared significantly worse than those who had never experienced it, regardless of whether they were called names by rivals, strangers, or friends. While this study also found evidence that the…

Limited research attention has been devoted to disparate vulnerabilities to social-ecological risk factors and how these may explain group differences in bullying by race. To address this gap, the present study used data of early adolescent respondents (M[subscript age] = 11.2 years) from 36 public middle schools (N = 2701) to assess the nexus of…

This paper has two purposes: First, we describe the components of the Student Ownership, Accountability, and Responsibility for School Safety (SOARS) framework in the context of the literature on school safety. Second, we offer outcomes from a pilot study testing the framework's impact on student perceptions of: (1) school belonging; (2) sense of…

We study changes to teacher working conditions from 2016-17 to 2022-23, covering school years before, during, and after the COVID pandemic. We show working conditions were improving leading into the pandemic but declined when the pandemic arrived. Perhaps more surprisingly, the pandemic was not a low point: teacher working conditions have…

Teachers' efforts to manage classroom social dynamics are associated with students' social and academic adjustment, but the determinants of teachers' use of social dynamics management strategies have remained unexplored. Multiple potential determinants of strategy use were examined in a study of 164 teachers and their 2986 students in 164 1st,…

The purpose of this study was to identify the factors that influence international students' sense of belonging. An in-depth review of existing research on sense of belonging helped me identify 18 factors closely connected to the sense of belonging of international students. I categorized these factors into four groups: (a) academic integration,…

In this research article, Haeny Yoon and Tran Nguyen Templeton explore the challenges of listening to children in both classrooms and research that purports to center young children. Through two stories from their respective studies, Yoon and Templeton highlight the complexities of following children's leads given the competing agendas situating…

This study contributes to the literature clarifying teaching practices in elementary classrooms that promote students' social relatedness. The focus on teaching practices reflects the need to understand malleable elements of the classroom, which can then be targeted for professional development. Specifically, this study examines whether children…

Involving more than 1,500 academically gifted students and their parents, this study examined relationships between family environment and social competence of gifted students. Results from an online survey revealed that our gifted students rated their families as cohesive and flexible with high levels of satisfaction and communication among…

The objective of this poster is to examine whether differences in the structural features of classroom peer networks (tight-knittedness, hierarchy, salience norms) are associated with differences in how individual students perceive the classroom environment (relational support from teachers and peers) and express achievement-related beliefs…

The long-term goal of this program of research is to clarify how teachers may influence features of peer networks that, in turn, may affect students' perceptions of social support, achievement-related beliefs and academic achievement. As a first step in this process, in this study the authors focus on identifying teaching practices that are…

This study tested the effects of 5 classroom contextual features on the social status (perceived popularity and social preference) that peers accord to aggressive students in late elementary school, including classroom peer status hierarchy (whether within-classroom differences in popularity are large or small), classroom academic level, and grade…

The Internet has had a profound effect on education and social interaction patterns. Educators struggle to stay abreast of technological advances and navigate the maze of positive and negative aspects of students using the Internet. A new use for the Internet is the relatively recent phenomenon called blogging. Blogging is a widely used means of…

A positive, welcoming environment and well-planned support services let students know they are valued and expected to succeed at a Lincolnshire, Illinois, high school. Programs include freshman transition, a tutoring resource center, guided study, a mentor program, student support teams, peer helpers, and annual student surveys. (MLH)