British Journal of Educational Psychology最新文献

Background: Previous research has shown that testing differs significantly from other classroom activities and is associated with heightened negative emotions and lower levels of positive emotions. However, relatively little is known about students' emotions surrounding testing, particularly in higher-stakes assessment settings.

Aims: This study aims to examine how students' levels of four emotions (i.e., happiness, relaxation, anxiety and boredom) develop from pre to-post-test, and it investigates how individual factors (i.e., gender, grade level, perceived mathematical competence and test performance), impact students' emotional states and moderate their emotional trajectories.

Sample: The sample (N = 2179) consists of 692 third-grade, 605 sixth-grade, 413 eighth-grade and 469 ninth-grade students from various schools across Finland, who participated in a digital, semi-high-stakes, end-of-year mathematics assessment.

Methods: An in-situ approach was used to assess students' emotions immediately before and after testing. Analyses were conducted using linear mixed-effects modelling to account for the repeated-measurements structure.

Results and conclusions: Students generally reported lower positive emotions after the assessment. The measured individual factors significantly predict both students' emotional states and their development during the assessment. Boys reported higher levels of positive emotions and lower anxiety, while younger students remained more positive during the assessment. Students who perceived themselves as competent experienced higher levels of positive and lower levels of negative emotions, whereas students who performed poorly showed a decline in positive emotions during the assessment. Future research could focus on whether support for emotional regulation affects student performance in test situations.

Background: Despite increasing research attention to teachers' emotional states, there remains a significant gap in understanding how educational leaders can effectively mitigate these issues.

Purpose: This study examined a multilevel, moderated mediation model that explored the relationship between responsible school leadership and emotional exhaustion, with the moderating role of teachers' proactive personality and the mediating effect of work meaningfulness.

Sample: The study utilized data from 739 teachers working in 72 schools across Türkiye. Participants represented a range of school contexts and demographic backgrounds, allowing for examination of both individual and school-level effects.

Method: A multilevel analytical approach was employed to test the hypothesized moderated mediation model, examining both direct and indirect effects of responsible leadership on emotional exhaustion.

Results: The findings indicate that responsible leadership is directly associated with reduced emotional exhaustion and indirectly linked to lower exhaustion through increased work meaningfulness. Moreover, among teachers with higher levels of proactive personality, responsible leadership was associated with a stronger reduction in emotional exhaustion compared to those with lower levels of proactive personality.

Conclusion: The findings contribute to the current literature by providing empirical evidence that the impact of leadership on teachers' emotional state is likely to vary across teachers with different personality traits.

Background: Successful inclusion in education depends heavily on the attitudes of teachers, and stereotypes play a significant role in shaping these attitudes. However, social desirability bias may limit direct measures of stereotypes. Combining direct and indirect measures offers better insights. But studies on SEN-specific stereotypes combining these measures are rare.

Aims: This study aims to investigate and compare pre-service teachers' explicit and implicit stereotypes towards autistic pupils, pupils with Down syndrome, and pupils with dyslexia using direct and indirect measures.

Sample: Our sample consisted of N = 76 German pre-service teachers with an average age of 22.75 years (SD = 3.32), of which 61% identified as female.

Methods: We assessed explicit stereotypes via a questionnaire and implicit stereotypes using lexical decision tasks. To compare explicit and implicit stereotypes, we computed Kendall's tau correlation coefficients.

Results: Participants rated stereotypical adjectives significantly above the neutral midpoint for all three groups. They responded significantly faster to stereotypical than to non-stereotypical words in the lexical decision tasks, with large effect sizes for explicit ratings and medium effect sizes for implicit measures. Explicit and implicit stereotypes did not correlate significantly with one another.

Conclusion: The study found that pre-service teachers clearly endorsed explicit stereotypes and showed implicit associations in line with these stereotypes, especially towards autistic pupils and those with Down syndrome, while patterns for dyslexia were less pronounced. These results underline how common such stereotypes are in educational contexts and suggest that interventions should address both explicit and implicit bias.

Background: Interest and effort are key motivational constructs in educational psychology, yet their interplay in learning remains underexplored. Building on Dewey's (Interest and effort in education, 1913) view that effort complements interest in fostering academic achievement, this research examines their relationship across different learning phases in accordance with a process model developed by Thoman et al. (The science of interest, 2017).

Aims: The aim of both studies is to empirically examine the interplay between interest and effort as predictors of learning outcomes.

Sample: The sample of Study 1 included 152 university students, and the sample of Study 2 included 120 university students.

Methods: Study 1 comprised two different learning tasks to investigate the relationship between interest and effort. Study 2 made use of a computer-supported learning environment where additional influences of prior knowledge could be controlled. Interest and effort were assessed before, during, and after the learning tasks.

Results: The results of both studies indicate that interest and effort serve as positive predictors of learning success and actively complement each other throughout the learning process.

Conclusion: Findings suggest that although interest stimulates initial engagement, effort is essential for sustained learning, supporting Dewey's view of their interdependence. Educators should foster both interest and effort to enhance learning outcomes.

Background: Bullying research has traditionally relied on self-reported measures such as questionnaires and interviews. Previous studies have shown developmental differences in attention mechanisms, with adults relying more on top-down processing and younger individuals on bottom-up attention. However, it remains unclear whether these differences extend to bullying scene observation and how they influence the perception of different bullying roles.

Aims: This study examined differences in visual attention (total fixation duration, visit count, fixation count) and verbal recognition of bullying roles between preadolescents and adults.

Sample: The study included 80 participants: 37 preadolescents (M_age = 10.11, SD = 1.10) and 43 adults (M_age = 30.72, SD = 4.89).

Methods: Participants viewed 12 vignette-based bullying scenes while their eye movements were recorded using an eye tracker. They then provided verbal descriptions of each observed vignette.

Results: Both groups primarily fixated on bullies and victims, reinforcing the centrality of the bully-victim dyad. However, adults allocated significantly more attention to the other roles and described them with greater accuracy than preadolescents. In particular, in adults, defenders and pro-bullies attracted more fixations, visits, and total fixation time, while bystanders received more total fixation time.

Conclusions: The findings suggest that adults process bullying situations in a more structured and holistic manner, likely due to top-down attentional mechanisms shaped by social experience. These developmental differences highlight the crucial role of adults in fostering awareness of all bullying roles among preadolescents, emphasizing the need for interventions that encourage broader role recognition beyond the bully-victim dynamic.

Background: Growth mindsets refer to the belief that personal attributes can be developed and improved through learning and effort. Much of the prior work on mindsets has focused on mindsets of intelligence, with little attention devoted to whether and how growth mindsets might also be relevant to the domain of social-emotional skills.

Aims: To address this gap, this study aimed to extend research on growth mindsets to the domain of social-emotional skills and examine the associations between growth mindsets and various types of social-emotional skills. We explored five broad social-emotional skills and 15 specific facet-level skills, including task performance (self-control, responsibility, persistence), emotional regulation (stress resistance, emotional control, optimism), engaging with others (energy, assertiveness, sociability), collaboration (empathy, cooperation, trust) and open mindedness (curiosity, creativity, tolerance).

Sample: We drew on data from 29,798 fifteen-year-old students from 10 cities across nine countries.

Methods: Hierarchical linear modelling was employed to investigate the association between growth mindsets and various types of social-emotional skills.

Results: Results indicated that a growth mindset of social-emotional skills was positively associated with five broad social-emotional skills: task performance, emotional regulation, engaging with others, collaboration, and open-mindedness. These results also applied to the 15 specific facet-level skills. Interestingly, we also found that mindsets of social-emotional skills were most strongly associated with emotional regulation.

Conclusion: This study extended the growth mindset literature by applying it to the domain of social-emotional skills. Our findings may have promising implications for future interventions aimed at improving students' social-emotional skills.

Background: The internal/external frame of reference (I/E) model explains the formation of domain-specific academic self-concepts. The generalized I/E (GI/E) model extends the I/E model to other motivational constructs, such as intrinsic value, and to various school subjects. When extending the I/E model to various school subjects, the domains of music and visual arts have seldom been examined.

Aims: This study examined a GI/E model that included achievements, self-concepts and intrinsic values in eight school subjects, including music and visual arts.

Sample: We used a sample of N = 442 German secondary school students.

Methods: The analyses were built upon structural equation modelling.

Results: The findings demonstrated negative achievement-self-concept and achievement-intrinsic value relations between math-like and verbal-like domains, indicating contrast effects. In addition, the findings demonstrated positive achievement-self-concept and achievement-intrinsic value relations among math-like domains, indicating assimilation effects. The findings further indicated negative relations between physics achievement and music self-concept, implying a contrast effect. In addition, the findings showed a positive relation between music achievement and English self-concept and between visual arts achievement and German intrinsic value, implying assimilation effects. Academic self-concept was found to fully mediate the relation between achievement and intrinsic value within the same domains and across different domains in most cases. The findings were shown to be invariant across gender groups.

Conclusion: The present study adds to the broad field of research on the I/E and GI/E models by considering the two neglected domains of music and visual arts.

Background: Within China's rural educational landscape, students in residential primary boarding institutions face distinctive psychosocial difficulties, with mathematics-related anxiety demonstrating heightened prevalence in these settings. As primary sources of social interaction within school settings, teachers exert significant influence on students' academic outcomes and psychological well-being through shaping their perceptions of educator support.

Methods: In this study, we recruited 400 fifth-grade students from rural boarding primary schools in Northwestern China and employed validated scales to measure perceived teacher support, self-efficacy, academic procrastination, and mathematics anxiety. A structural equation modelling (SEM) framework was utilized to explore the pathways through which perceived teacher support impacts mathematics anxiety, with particular attention to the independent and chain mediating roles of self-efficacy and academic procrastination.

Results: Key findings indicated that: (i) Perceived teacher support exhibited significant negative correlations with academic procrastination and mathematics anxiety, while showing a significant positive correlation with self-efficacy; (ii) Both self-efficacy and academic procrastination independently mediated the relationship between perceived teacher support and mathematics anxiety; (iii) A sequential chain mediation pathway was identified, whereby perceived teacher support enhanced self-efficacy, which subsequently reduced academic procrastination, ultimately alleviating mathematics anxiety.

Conclusion: These findings emphasize the critical role of perceived teacher support in mitigating mathematics anxiety among rural boarding students through cognitive and behavioural mechanisms, providing empirical foundations for targeted educational interventions.

Introduction: Self-regulated learning (SRL) interventions have been widely recognized for their potential to enhance students' academic achievement; however, their effects on math-related motivational constructs remain less explored. This study investigated the impact of an SRL intervention on multiple math-related motivational factors (math perseverance, math self-efficacy, math utility value, STEM vocational interest and theory of intelligence) and math performance among Year 6 and Year 7 middle school students (N = 382), assessing outcomes both immediately after the intervention (post-test) and 6 months later (follow-up).

Methods: Students in the SRL intervention group engaged in six sessions focusing on planning, performance monitoring and self-evaluation strategies. In contrast, a control group practiced the same math exercises without explicit SRL training.

Results: Findings revealed that, at post-test, the SRL group showed improvements in math perseverance, math utility value, and theory of intelligence, as well as in math performance, compared to the control group. No differences were observed in math self-efficacy and STEM vocational interest. However, gains in math perseverance, theory of intelligence and math performance persisted at the 6-month follow-up, suggesting persistent benefits of the SRL intervention.

Conclusion: These findings underscore the value of integrating SRL interventions into regular math instruction and highlight the potential of such interventions to foster both math motivation and performance.