Students' sense of belonging impacts their affect, motivation, well-being, and academic success. Sense of belonging is considered context-dependent as what determines one's belonging differs across contexts. This study explores how sense of belonging manifests among post-secondary, introductory chemistry students. This context is important given…

Changing attitudes towards disabilities have resulted in corresponding transformations in social justice and human rights issues that have led to an increase in inclusive education practices across the world and a corresponding change in emphasis to address social inclusion of students with disability in the inclusive classroom. Research indicates…

Drawing on a developmental psychopathology perspective and research documenting gender differences in social tasks and structures of friendships, this study uses longitudinal social network analysis (SNA) methods to (a) examine how fear of negative evaluation (FNE) and gender interact to shape friendship dynamics and (b) characterize their…

This study analyzes the self-perceptions of social competence in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It compares two groups of participants, children with ADHD (N = 20) and children without ADHD (N = 20) ages between 8 and 12 years old. Sociometric questionnaires were completed by two groups of participants and 707…

A quasi-experimental group design with repeated measures at pretest and posttest was employed to examine the effect of teaching with picture books about autism on improving typically developing children's acceptance and attitude toward children with autism in this study. The participants were children with autism and their typically developing…

The objective of this exploratory study was to examine the interpersonal dynamics of an after-school math club for middle schoolers. Using social network analysis, 2 networks were identified and analyzed: (a) a network of friendship relationships and (b) a network of working relationships. The interconnections and correlations between friendship…

This small-scale study, conducted in Cyprus, considers issues of friendship by exploring the views of children (aged 6-8 years) without disabilities towards peers with physical disabilities. Participants were interviewed with the use of images depicting children with physical disabilities and were asked to justify their friendship, express their…

Peer relationships form a key developmental context. The current study investigated differences in peer acceptance between high-ability and average-ability youth, from the perspectives of teachers, peers, and students. Relying on the person-group similarity model, we also tested whether high-ability students' acceptance would depend on the peer…

Social norms are vital for the functioning of adolescent peer groups; they can protect the well-being of groups and individual members, often by deterring harmful behaviors, such as aggression, through enforcement mechanisms like peer victimization; in adolescent peer groups, those who violate aggression norms are often subject to victimization.…

This mixed-method study examines students' expectations and concerns before transitioning from primary to lower secondary school and the role of students' school-related wellbeing and self-esteem in their concerns. Students reported their beliefs about the forthcoming school transition and filled in a questionnaire assessing school burnout and…

Whilst most social and educational research on friendship focuses on children at school, it remains a crucially important factor for students in higher education -- and can play a key role in the maintenance, exacerbation or subversion of dominant forms of social inequalities. This paper explores the complexities of such dynamics in relation to…

This study investigated the gender-specific effects of social achievement goals -- i.e., social development goals, social demonstration approach goals, and social demonstration avoid goals -- on bullying perpetration in a sample of 788 adolescents (53.3% girls), taking into account the mediating role of sense of belonging and non-inclusive group…

Despite the importance of students without special needs' perspectives in promoting successful social inclusion strategies in the classroom, their perspectives are not well represented in the literature. The purpose of this scoping review was to summarise the perspectives of students without special needs around the social inclusion of students…

Rejection sensitivity (RS) is a cognitive and affective disposition to defensively expect, perceive, and overreact to signs of rejection by others. The current study examined the role of RS as a mediating mechanism underlying the relation between school relations with peers and teachers and solitude in early adolescence. Italian middle school…

The aim of the study was to examine Swedish school pupils' perspectives on why some pupils engage in bullying, support bullying or avoid standing up for the one(s) being bullied, despite a shared understanding that bullying is wrong. Through the use of focus group interviews combined with two bullying vignettes, a total of 74 pupils from grades 5…