Journal of School Psychology

Intrapersonal perfectionism is the dispositional tendency to impose perfectionistic expectations on oneself and is considered a bidimensional construct that consists of standards perfectionism and discrepancy perfectionism. Although scholars established the links between standards perfectionism and psychological adjustment and between discrepancy perfectionism and psychopathology, the mechanisms that explain these associations remain relatively unknown. Thus, a better understanding of these mechanisms, especially in children, is warranted given their high prevalence in this developmental population and potential destructiveness on psychological well-being...

Past research on situated expectancy-value theory has regularly provided evidence of different motivational patterns indicating that not only can students be characterized by different levels of motivation (e.g., low vs. high), but also by divergent profiles (e.g., high success expectancies, low task values). This person-oriented two-wave study (a) identified and compared the motivational patterns of secondary school students from different learning environments (i.e., Student-Centered Learning vs. Teacher-Directed Learning), (b) analyzed the stability of and changes to these patterns during a school year, and (c) examined whether achievement-related choices and performance predicted the pattern changes...

Disentangling the connections between subjective and psychological well-being may help practitioners identify effective targets of intervention to promote mental health in school settings. Based on theoretical foundations of well-being, the present study utilized psychometric network analysis to explore prospective associations between the subjective and psychological well-being of adolescents over 2 years. To this end, a cross-sectional network was estimated at Time 1 (n = 560) and Time 2 (n = 281), followed by a longitudinal network incorporating individual changes across time points in each component (n = 235)...

Defending the victim in bullying situations is a moral behavior that has received increasing attention in the literature. However, important questions about the development and maintenance of defending behaviors remain unanswered. The present study adopted a longitudinal design with two main goals: (a) identifying trajectories of change in individuals' defending behavior over time and (b) describing and comparing the initial levels and dynamics of change in normative and social adjustment and self-perceived popularity between the different defending trajectories...

Emotion regulation is assumed to underlie academic achievement through different mechanisms (e.g., a positive orientation toward school and schoolwork, better mental health). However, few studies have contrasted these mediating mechanisms within a longitudinal analytic framework, which is necessary to determine which mechanism(s) are most likely to translate emotion regulation into academic success over time. The present study addressed this gap by examining whether children's emotion regulation capacities were associated with later academic achievement through school-related (i...

Decades of research have indicated that reading self-concept is an important predictor of reading achievement. During this period, the population of emergent bilinguals has continued to increase within United States' schools. However, the existing literature has tended to examine native English speakers' and emergent bilinguals' reading self-concept in the aggregate, thereby potentially obfuscating the unique pathways through which reading self-concept predicts reading achievement. Furthermore, due to the overreliance of native English speakers in samples relating to theory development, researchers attempting to examine predictors of reading achievement may a priori select variables that are more aligned with native English speakers' experiences...

Due to their promise as a feasible tool for evaluating the effects of school-based interventions, Direct Behavior Ratings (DBR) have received much research attention over the past 2 decades. Although DBR methodology has demonstrated much promise, favorable psychometric characteristics only have been demonstrated for tools measuring a small number of constructs. Likewise, although a variety of methods of DBR have been proposed, most extant studies have focused on the use of single-item methods. The present study examined the dependability of four methods of formative behavioral assessment (i...

Participation in organized extracurricular activities (EAs) has become increasingly common among preschool-aged children. Prior studies have shown inconsistent findings on the association between young children's involvement in EAs and their subsequent developmental outcomes. Moving beyond examining the main effects of EA participation, this study focused on whether children's behavioral regulation and approaches to learning-two important domain-general skills closely linked to learning-would moderate the association between EA participation and academic readiness...

Teachers are tasked with not only delivering high-quality, evidence-based academic instruction, but they are also responsible for managing student behavior within the classroom and school. To manage these behaviors, teachers can use a variety of strategies that result in a range of outcomes on student and school-wide functioning. Although an overreliance on punitive strategies has been shown to worsen behavior problems, positive strategies and social-emotional learning (SEL) techniques are associated with more favorable outcomes for students' global functioning...

There is high agreement that motivation is an important factor for successful learning processes and outcomes. But how do students differ in terms of motivation and how do these differences affect the effectiveness of a motivation intervention? As an intervention interacts with students' characteristics, students' heterogeneity must be considered and homogeneous intervention effects must be critically examined. This study aimed to identify motivation profiles of a specifically vulnerable student group, namely students in the lowest ability tier in the learning of mathematics...

Personal characteristics and classroom environment features both play important roles in predicting students' levels of classroom engagement. The present study took a person-environment transaction perspective to investigate how factors at both the personal (i.e., student externalizing behaviors) and relational (i.e., teacher-student relationships) levels jointly predict the development of classroom engagement behaviors in a sample of 784 elementary school students. Using a longitudinal cross-lagged model spanning across Grade 3 to Grade 5, we found a negative reciprocal association between teacher-student relationships and externalizing behaviors, such that a more positive teacher-student relationship predicted fewer externalizing behaviors in the subsequent academic year, and fewer externalizing behaviors predicted a more positive teacher-student relationship 1 year later...

Parental incarceration has been associated with educational disadvantages for children, such as lower educational attainment, increased grade retention, and truancy and suspensions. However, children exposed to parental incarceration often experience other adversities that are also associated with educational disadvantage; the contribution of these co-occurring adversities has not been considered in previous research. This study aimed to investigate the educational outcomes of children exposed to (a) maternal incarceration alone and (b) maternal incarceration plus other adversities (i...

The purpose of this meta-analysis was to examine the impact of school-based therapeutic and math skill interventions on math anxiety symptoms and math achievement among K-12 students. Potential moderators included treatment type and study quality. A systematic search yielded 17 included studies representing 1786 primary and secondary students. The results suggested that therapeutic interventions reduced math anxiety symptoms (gav  = -0.51) better than math skill interventions (gav  = -0...

This study utilized a longitudinal person-centered approach to investigate how children's achievement goals combine with the goals held for them by their parents and teachers to form unique achievement goal profiles among a sample of 619 elementary school students (Mage  = 9.782; 52.5% female; 79.2% first- and second-generation immigrants) from low SES ethnically diverse neighborhoods. Our results revealed four distinct profiles that proved to be identical from one school year to the next: (a) Low on all Goals, (b) High on all Goals, (c) Mastery-Oriented, and (d) Low Mastery Goals...

The teaching career, and especially the transition from pre-service to in-service teaching, is uniquely characterized by change. Adaptability is an internal characteristic that has been shown to benefit teachers and may be especially relevant as they begin developing initial perceptions of themselves as educators, of their relationships with students, and of the teaching career at large. Importantly though, it is likely that the impacts of adaptability depend in part on the broader context. One such contextual factor that is highly relevant to teachers is their school's climate...

Designed for middle and high school students to rate the cultural humility levels among their teachers, this two-study article reports on the development and initial validation of the Cultural Humility Scale for Students (CHS-S), which was adapted from the original Cultural Humility Scale used in psychotherapy. Having cultural humility may facilitate positive teacher-student relationships by preventing or responding to cultural differences when they occur. Study 1 validated the scale's use with a sample of middle school students (N = 1522)...

As school climate plays a key role in adolescents' academic and socio-emotional outcomes, interventions that can enhance this climate are of major interest. In considering research on practices linked to a positive school climate, School-Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (SWPBIS) is a promising approach. To date, most SWPBIS studies have been conducted in English-speaking countries and have been based primarily on adults' perceptions or reports (e.g., suspension rates, office discipline referrals)...

With concern growing about the increasing levels of school stress among secondary school students, examining its associations with students' perceptions of important elements in classroom climate can offer valuable scientific information. However, there is minimal research about the role of perceived classroom goal structures and teacher support in school stress. In addition, most research on classroom goal structure has not made a distinction between performance-approach structures and performance-avoidance structures, which may have different effects on school stress...

The contribution of racial bias to teachers' racialized discipline practices is increasingly clear, but the processes by which these biases are activated are less well understood. This study examined teachers' emotional responses to students' misbehaviors by student race as well as whether teachers' emotional responses serve to mediate the association between student race and teachers' discipline practices. Results from a sample of 228 teachers in the United States indicated that teachers were 71% more likely to report feeling anger as compared to concern when they read about a potentially challenging behavior of a Black student as compared to a White student...

Writing proficiency facilitates higher achievement in educational and professional endeavors, yet most students fail to meet national writing benchmarks by the end of high school. Attentional control and overall reading skill are documented to result in better writing quality; however, most research on these relationships has focused on early elementary students (K-3rd grade. This project evaluated the relationship between attentional control, hyperactivity-impulsivity, word reading, and reading comprehension to overall writing performance on a high-stakes writing test...