Education and Child Study

Research suggests friendships play an important role in adolescents' social well-being as well as affecting their academic motivation and academic performance. Still, how friendships actually affect academic outcomes is not completely understood, particularly the role of peer perceptions. The present study offers an empirical explanation for how perceptions of friends' social and academic behaviors might affect academic outcomes. Using a nationally representative sample of 8,040 tenth graders, the authors tested a meditational model examining how perceptions of friends' academic and social behaviors might affect math self-concept and math performance. Results suggest that perceptions of friends' academic behaviors relate to academic performance, but only when perceptions align with one's self-concept. Perceptions of friends' social behaviors were negatively related to math self-concept and academic performance. Tests of gender moderation suggested negligible gender differences for how perceptions of friends' social and academic behaviors related to math self-concept and math performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Can aggressive children be popular with peers? Generally, sociometric popularity (liking nominations) has been shown to be negatively associated with aggression, and perceived popularity (popularity nominations) has been shown to be positively associated with aggression. The thesis of the present research was that being respected by peers moderates the relation between aggression and popularity. For both third- through sixth-grade boys (N = 107) and girls (N = 117), perceived popularity by peers was positively associated with nominations for aggression (both overt and relational) only for children high in respect. Aggression was negatively associated with sociometric popularity for girls who were low in respect; sociometric popularity for girls high in respect was not related to aggression nominations. In sum, aggressive children were considered to be popular only if they were respected; aggressive girls were not disliked if they were respected.

Teachers must address both children’s academic and social needs to maintain a supportive and optimal learning environment. In order to successfully create and maintain an optimal learning environment, teachers’ influence on children’s peer relations in the classroom must be intentional. This can be accomplished by addressing how psychological research on children’s peer relations can be explicitly applied to the classroom context. This review addresses contemporary research in children’s peer relations during the elementary school years with a primary focus on how teachers can intentionally influence children’s peer acceptance in classroom settings. Teachers should intentionally shape children’s peer relations in their elementary classrooms through increasing their attunement to peer group affiliations, using classroom management strategies that foster intended classroom norms, and using classroom spatial arrangements effectively.

This paper is a theoretical contribution that bridges literature and theory in psychology, anthropology, and environmental education to address persistent concerns over how to create desired cultural change for more responsible environmental citizens. Cultural and personal narratives shape how we view ourselves, including our relationship to the environment. The frontier narratives that moved Americans westward, for example, have fed into Americans’ drive towards excessive consumption and resulted in soil depletion among other challenges. Thus, it is important to consider how we form personal narratives and how personal narratives can shape our larger cultural narratives about our relationships with the environment. In this paper, we argue that childhood narratives are influenced by children’s autobiographical memories (Fivush, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 37:59–82, 2007). Children’s autobiographical memories become narratives when they are retold with others and given cultural meaning (e.g., Nelson and Fivush, Psychological Review 111(2):486–511, 2004). Psychological literature suggests that individual narratives not only shape the development of identity (Bluck and Alea, Critical Advances in Reminiscence Work pp. 61–75, 2002) but also reshape and inform larger cultural narratives (e.g., Fivush, Annual Review of Psychology 62:559–582, 2011). Applied to environmental education and activism, we suggest a new framework where simply by providing a space for and encouraging children to talk about ecological experiences, such as tending a garden or taking a walk, these experiences may shape a child’s personal narrative (Fivush, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 37:59–82, 2007), creating a positive environmental identity (Clayton and Opotow 2003) and promoting a larger cultural narrative of environmental resiliency. If we change our children’s stories then, we change ourselves.

This chapter serves to discuss common perspectives of respect in the classroom and highlight ways to re-conceptualize authority in student-teacher relationships so that respect can be grounded in both authority and caring. The authors believe that through the framework of critical race theory, teachers can learn how to express caring respect in ways that will be validating to their students. Furthermore, because of this reframing of authority, teachers will be able to accept non-authority-based respect. Finally, this chapter encourages teachers to experience and understand respect in the ways that validate their students as people and honor their own abilities as teachers. Rather than using ideas of respect to exhibit and reinforce institutional authority, teachers can instead promote caring respect in their classrooms by highlighting students' voices and reflecting on their own roles as both an educator and a person.

Student respect toward teachers is traditionally considered in terms of behavior or authority. Yet, because of cultural differences and historic oppression of marginalized students in schools, not all students express respect in ways in which teachers are familiar. Because of structural inequalities and individual differences, standard behavioral definitions of respect are insufficient to address how students and teachers actually experience respect in the classroom. Using a comparative case study design, this study examined two female White novice teachers’ beliefs and experiences of student respect within a novel relational respect framework. Results identified that teachers’ respect beliefs were based on notions of authority, while respect experiences reflected authority and relationship-based respect. Importantly, these relationships were conceptualized as role model and friend-based respect. To help novice teachers balance their roles as both caring and authoritative figures, I...

Short-term, faculty-led study abroad programs are increasingly featured in higher education internationalization efforts. As noted in the literature, such programs can aid in the development of varied student outcomes, including developing global citizenship. This paper presents an examination of the Global Engagement Seminar (GES) program, a short-term, faculty-led program at a private women’s liberal arts college that has expressed a firm commitment to internationalization. A quasi-experimental design was employed to examine whether participation in the GES program influenced participants’ antecedents, identification, and pro-social values of global citizenship (Reysen & Katzarska-Miller 2013a), and how the relationships compare with those of a matched comparison sample. The results of the survey indicated that GES completion moderated some but not all of the paths in the global citizenship model. Completing a GES was associated with non-significant relations among the moderated p...

Teachers are ethically obligated to care for their students. One overlooked means of demonstrating care is through respect. However, because respectful behaviors are culturally dependent, exploring experiences of respect from students of color is needed to provide insight into student-teacher relationships. To understand students’ experiences of respect from teachers in the school setting, we interviewed 12 adolescents and emerging adults of color (M age = 17, SD age = 1.81) who attended Urban schools, about their experiences of respect from their teachers. We deductively and inductively coded the interviews separately for definitions of respect and experiences of respect from teachers using six themes of respect. Ultimately, youth often defined respect as the golden rule and politeness. However, when discussing instances of respect with teachers, youth described teachers demonstrating care for students’ personal lives and academic success. Our findings suggest that students identif...

In this article, we describe several role-playing exercises on acculturation and relevant cultural adjustment processes that we incorporated into Tomcho and Foel’s classroom activity on acculturation, and we report data that examine subsequent changes in students’ responses on pretest and posttest measures shortly after the activity and present qualitative themes derived from students’ reflections taken from an assignment at the end of the semester. We found no increases in students’ perceptions that role-playing can help them gain a better understanding of acculturation. However, there were increases in students’ awareness that acculturation is a real-world phenomenon, their understanding of how acculturation can impact people’s lives, and their sensitivity and empathy for people who face some of the challenges associated with acculturation, even after controlling for students’ pretest level of interest in cultural issues. Furthermore, thematic analyses indicated that students learned some of the challenges associated with acculturation and were able to label personal experiences associated with acculturation. They also gained concrete knowledge about and in-depth realization of the concept of acculturation. Instructors who teach psychology classes can use this exercise to complement traditional methods of teaching.

Playing drinking games can be characterized as a high-risk drinking activity because games are typically designed to promote heavy alcohol consumption. While research suggests that young adults are motivated to play drinking games for a variety of reasons (e.g., for thrills/fun, for the competition), the Motives for Playing Drinking Games measure has received limited empirical attention. We examined the psychometric properties of this measure with a confirmation sample of young adults recruited from Amazon's MTurk ( N = 1,809, ages 18-25 years, 47% men; 41% not currently enrolled in college) and a validation sample of college students ( N = 671; ages 18-23 years; 26% men). Contrary to the 8-factor model obtained by Johnson and Sheets in a study published in 2004, examination of the factor structure with our confirmation sample yielded a revised 7-factor model that was invariant across race/ethnicity and college student status. This model was also validated with the college stude...