The present study explored the effect of instructing middle school students in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades in positive psychology lessons, as compared to control classes that did not receive this positive psychology instruction. This study used quantitative procedures to determine the implementation of this curriculum on lowering student…

In school bullying, witnesses play a fundamental role because their defensive reactions can stop bullying situations. However, a great majority of witnesses remain passive despite their prodefense personal beliefs. To address this gap between witnesses' beliefs and behaviors, we developed and tested two social psychology strategies, namely, the…

Early adolescence is a time of increased stress and risk for poorer psychosocial functioning, but few studies have explored the relationship between stress and psychosocial functioning in the context of teacher-student relationships during early adolescence. This study used a two-wave longitudinal design to investigate the unique and interactive…

The 2020 Norwegian national curriculum for primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary education includes a "competence aim" after Year 7 that expects pupils to be able to "investigate how gender, gender roles, and sexuality are presented in music and dance in the public sphere and create expressions that challenge…

Brain-Based Learning (BBL) is an educational theoretical framework based on principles that derive from important findings about the structure and function of the brain through biology, psychology, and neuroscientific research, and forms a holistic context for a comprehensive instructional approach design. In the present study, a teaching…

This article is the first of a two-part series that explores science teachers' and their pupils' experiences of using different pedagogical approaches based on understandings of how brains learn. For this case-study research, nine science teachers were interviewed and four teachers self-selected to trial a pedagogical approach, new to them, from…

History education rests at the junction between historical content, disciplinary literacy, and educational psychology. To understand the sources and strategies that facilitate historical thinking, more inquiries are needed. How do students respond to different historical topics, texts, and tasks? Which sources and strategies best facilitate…

Most interventions intended to improve subjective well-being, termed "positive psychology interventions" (PPIs), have neglected to include relevant stakeholders in youth's lives and have not included booster sessions intended to maintain gains in subjective well-being. The current study investigated the impact of a multitarget,…

Recent advances in automated writing evaluation have enabled educators to use automated writing quality scores to improve assessment feasibility. However, there has been limited investigation of bias for automated writing quality scores with students from diverse racial or ethnic backgrounds. The use of biased scores could contribute to…

The present study explored the associations among positive psychological traits, school functioning, and psychological adjustment of elementary schoolchildren. Participants included 392 children in Grades 6-8 attending a Turkish public elementary school. There were 48.2% (189) female and 51.8% (203) male participants, and they ranged in age from…

The development of divergent thinking (DT) in school-age children and adolescents has received considerable attention in the educational psychology literature since the 1970s. A body of research has outlined the existence of slumps (i.e., temporary declines) in this development with, however, conflicting findings concerning the magnitude and…

Past research has suggested that there may be benefits in learning from expository science text when students study with the expectation that they will need to teach another student. The present experiments were designed to extend prior work by testing if an effect would be seen on both immediate tests (similar to those used in most prior studies)…

We constructed and calibrated an instrument targeting conceptual and procedural fraction knowledge. We used this instrument in a quantitative study with 126 secondary students (7th and 9th graders), testing the hypothesis that there are individual differences in the way students combine the two types of knowledge. Cluster analysis revealed four…

The present study aimed to evaluate the impact of "Strengths Gym" (Proctor & Fox Eades, in Strengths gym: Year 8, Positive Psychology Research Centre, Pennsylvania, 2009; Proctor et al., in J Posit Psychol, 6:377-388, 2011)--an intervention based on the Values in Action (VIA; Peterson & Seligman in Character strengths and…

Bullying prevention and intervention are ongoing challenges for all educators, school psychologists included. A lack of research exists regarding the potential role of middle school students as direct actors in bullying prevention and intervention. This article describes a novel student leadership group for seventh graders in which the primary…