The overall objective of this study was to investigate the longitudinal association between diffusion of responsibility and pro-aggressive bystander behavior across three time points in upper elementary education. This three-wave longitudinal study included 1905 Swedish students who completed a questionnaire in at least one of the three waves: the…

Disengagement is a concept that captures the gradual behavioral, affective, and cognitive distancing from school, and is thus an early indicator of students being at risk for dropout. Based on a social identity framework, we predicted that higher social identification with the class and a positive classroom climate would be associated with lower…

Guided by the social-cognitive theory and self-determination theory, this study examined whether moral disengagement is indirectly associated with pro-bullying, passive bystanding, and defending, mediated by autonomous motivation, introjected motivation, extrinsic motivation, and amotivation to defend victims of bullying among early adolescents.…

Aggressive student behavior is considered a leading risk factor for teacher stress. However, teachers' coping styles may affect how they perceive and respond to aggressive student behavior. This study tests whether teachers' perceptions of aggressive student behavior mainly mirror objectively observed aggression in presence of the teacher (as…

According to attributional theory, when the application of effort leads to success we praise the achievement. Effort and ability, however, are seen as compensatory and thus, paradoxically, being praised can lead to attributions of low ability. Our study investigates whether praise, not for academic performance, but for social classroom behavior,…

The aim of the current study was to extend knowledge of occupational commitment by examining predictors at the teacher- and school-level. Several job resources hypothesized to be positively associated with occupational commitment were examined: helpful feedback, input in decision-making, teacher collaboration, and principal discipline support. The…

Disruptive student behavior is a frequent part of school life, most often shown by male students and related to many negative academic outcomes. In this study, we examined the psychological benefits of engaging in disruptive behavior for low-achieving students from an attributional perspective. In an experimental vignette study of 178 ninth…

Previous studies undertaken internationally have concluded that teachers commonly underestimate the prevalence of bullying among students at their schools. Evidence supporting this claim is based upon findings that estimations of bullying prevalence derived from the self-reports of individual students are higher than the estimations made by…

Clarity of school rules and teachers' use of praise are strategies suggested to facilitate a positive classroom climate. Studies indicate difficulties for teachers to use such approaches in classrooms with higher levels of disruption. To study (1) if student-rated clarity of school rules, use of praise, and classroom climate differ between…

Aggression and social insecurity in children have received a lot of attention in recent research. In the current study the purpose was to examine whether specific demographic characteristics, such as gender, age (that is educational level and school class) and geographical area are significant factors for a child's aggressive and socially insecure…

This study reports results from cross-cultural comparisons of (a) the frequency of university students' experiences of bullying victimization and perpetration between students, (b) students' experiences of bullying victimization by university personnel, and (c) the breakdown of victimization by the forms of bullying students have experienced.…

The present study tests a model of the interplay between teaching style determinants, interpersonal resources, and teacher burnout dimensions, controlling for teachers' experience variables. Two-hundred and ninety-seven teachers in the Portuguese educational system teaching in a rural region participated in the research. Using a Structural…

The teacher's pet phenomenon is generally regarded as a negative concept by both teachers and students as it violates the principle of fairness. A careful review of the existing literature reveals that the concept of 'teacher's pet' is taken for granted and therefore no inclusive definition has been provided. In response to this gap, the present…

Strain theories expect socio-economically disadvantaged students to be overrepresented among perpetrators of school-deviant behavior. Empirical research, however, is inconclusive about the SES-deviance relationship. Recently, strain theorists argued that economic deprivation, rather than a socio-economic status (SES) index is related to…

With reference to social-ecological, self-determination, attributional, and social cognitive theories, the current study examined whether gender, age, altruistic motivation to defend victims, and tendency to blame the victims, at the individual level, and the prevalence of reinforcing and defending, at the classroom level, were associated with…