Child physical activity (PA) is influenced by social environment. Self-perception and perception of others' behaviors may impact health behaviors such as PA. This study examines associations between child networks, perception of their own PA and the network's perception of their PA. Children (n = 89, M age = 10.00, SD = 1.34) at a summer care…

Peer-effects research finds that preschool children's language growth is associated with classmates' skills and that children with disabilities especially benefit from classmates with higher skills. The current study estimates the amount of "peer language resources" individual children access through their classroom-based peer social…

The growing popularity of Social Networking Sites (SNS) that are embedded with networked infrastructures serves as an ideal platform for developing a networked learning environment connecting geographically dispersed learners. Unlike the traditional learning systems which provide only limited sources of data, the learners engaged in virtual…

This study examines the association between high school teachers' collegial networks and their own familiarity with, and practices related to, supporting students' admission to college. Using survey data collected at two time points from 163 teachers in four mid-Michigan high schools in 2011-2012, this study (a) employs cluster analysis to map…

Interactions with teachers and peers are critical for children's social, behavioral, and academic development in the classroom context. However, these two types of interpersonal interactions in the classroom are usually pursued via separate lines of inquiries. The current study bridges these two areas of research to examine the way in which…

This paper studies how the effectiveness of teachers varies by classroom composition. We combine random assignment of teachers to classrooms with rich measures of teacher effectiveness based on a popular observational protocol, Framework for Teaching, to overcome key endogeneity concerns related to measurement and matching. We find that…

Background: It is well documented that friends' externalizing problems and negative parent-child interactions predict externalizing problems in adolescence, but relatively little is known about the role of siblings. This four-wave, multi-informant study investigated linkages of siblings' externalizing problems and sibling-adolescent negative…

In order to battle bullying, it can be important for students to have teachers whom they see as taking an active stand against bullying in terms of propagating antibullying norms and having an efficacious approach to decreasing bullying. This expectation was tested with data from the control schools of the Finnish evaluation of the KiVa…

Classmates can influence a student's academic achievement through immediate interactions (e.g., academic help, positive attitudes toward reading) or by sharing tangible or intangible family resources (books, stories of foreign travel). Multilevel analysis of 141,019 fourth-grade students' reading achievements in 33 countries showed that…

Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (N = 13,970), we examined whether two aspects of school-family connections, parental involvement and communication quality, accounted for the association between classroom composition and children's academic and socioemotional functioning following the transition to…

Children's social interactions with their peers influence their psychosocial adjustment; consequently, the relationship between class-wide peer liking, same-gender peer liking, and school adjustment was explored in two age groups. Peer liking was analysed using the social relations model (SRM). In Study 1, 205 children (103 female and 102 male,…

Based on a sample of 406 seven-year-old twins, this study examined whether exposure to friends' social or physical aggression, respectively, moderates the effect of heritability on children's own social and physical aggression. Univariate analyses showed that children's own social and physical aggression were significantly explained by genetic…

This study examined factors that relate to the persistence of first-generation undergraduate students in a 4-year public university in the Southeastern United States. Results were analyzed from a 2011 two-part survey: CARES-I (College Assessment of Readiness for Entering Students-Intent) and CARES-A (College Assessment of Readiness for Entering…

In this pilot study, we sought to examine the influence of the beliefs of Grade 10 to 12 physical science teachers on their intended and actual usage of interactive simulations (Physics Education Technology, or PhET) in their classrooms. A combination of the Theory of Planned Behaviour, the Technology Acceptance Model and the Innovation Diffusion…

This article explores the empirical validity of the Social Interactionist (SI) perspective as an explanation of violent victimization. An additional goal is to explain why early puberty among adolescents is connected to violent victimization. Using SI, we theorize that early puberty creates unusually high levels of distress for adolescents (more…