Insight into causal mechanisms underlying underachievement among gifted students has remained elusive. Based on the premise of self-worth theory and implicit beliefs about intelligence, it was hypothesized that entity-focused messages about giftedness would lead to maladaptive academic coping behaviors when gifted status was threatened. Therefore,…

Children from immigrant families make up a growing proportion of young children in the United States. This study highlights the heterogeneity in early academic skills related to parental region of origin. It also considers the contributions of early home and nonparental care settings to the diversity in early academic performance. Using nationally…

This study examines concurrent teacher-student interaction quality and 5th graders' (n = 387) engagement in mathematics classrooms (n = 63) and considers how teacher-student interaction quality relates to engagement differently for boys and girls. Three approaches were used to measure student engagement in mathematics: Research assistants observed…

School climate is widely recognized as an important influence on peer victimization in schools. The purpose of this study is to examine how authoritative school climate theory provides a framework for conceptualizing 2 key features of school climate--disciplinary structure and student support--that are associated with 3 measures of peer…

We examined whether African American students differentially responded to dimensions of the observed classroom-learning environment compared with non-African American students. Further, we examined whether these dimensions of the classroom mediated treatment effects of a preschool mathematics intervention targeted at students from low-income…

The current study was designed to examine the ways in which perceived behavioral norms among grade mates and school social climate vary across the transition to middle school. The main goals of the study were to test whether Latino students may be more sensitive to the school social climate than White students and whether perceived behavioral…

Can multimedia learning environments be designed to foster positive emotions that will improve learning and related affective outcomes? College students (N = 118) were randomly assigned to 4 conditions created by 2 factors related to learners' emotion: "external mood induction" (positive vs. neutral emotions) and "emotional design induction"…

In this study, we investigated effects of the proportion of language minority students in classrooms on the development of students' intrinsic motivation in language lessons and the mediating role of instructional climate (e.g., teacher support, focus on student interests). In addition, we explored the interaction between the proportion of…

In a randomized-controlled trial, we tested 2 brief interventions designed to mitigate the effects of a "chilly climate" women may experience in engineering, especially in male-dominated fields. Participants were students entering a selective university engineering program. The "social-belonging intervention" aimed to protect…

Studies indicate that individuals who are exposed to political violence and who experience personal threat and posttraumatic distress might also develop prejudicial and exclusionist attitudes toward outgroup members. To tackle this destructive dynamics in children, the authors implemented a 2-pronged approach, combining stress-reduction…

We examined classrooms as complex systems that affect students' literacy learning through interacting effects of content and amount of time individual students spent in literacy instruction along with the global quality of the classroom learning environment. We observed 27 3rd-grade classrooms serving 315 target students using 2 different…

School-Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS; Sugai & Horner, 2006) is currently implemented in over 20,000 schools across the country with the goal of preventing disruptive behavior problems and enhancing the school climate. While previous studies have indicated significant main effects of SWPBIS on student outcomes, the…

Prior research has demonstrated that teachers' professional knowledge and motivation are strongly related to students' learning and motivation. Symptoms of teachers' stress and burnout (e.g., emotional exhaustion) are also thought to influence students' achievement, but no empirical study has tested this prediction. Using multilevel analyses and a…

Changes in the demands posed by increasingly complex workplaces in the 21st century have raised the importance of nonroutine skills such as complex problem solving (CPS). However, little is known about the antecedents and outcomes of CPS, especially with regard to malleable external factors such as classroom climate. To investigate the relations…

Big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE) research (e.g., Marsh & Parker, 1984) has found that perceptions of academic ability are generally positively related to individual ability and negatively related to classroom and school average ability. However, BFLPE research typically relies on environmental differences as a between-subjects factor. Unlike…