School functioning in early adolescence: Gender-linked responses to peer victimization.

Research indicates that peer victimization contributes to poor school functioning in childhood and adolescence, yet the processes by which victimization interferes with school functioning are unclear. This study examined internalizing and externalizing problems as domain-specific mediators of the association between subtypes of peer victimization (relational, physical) and school functioning (engagement, achievement) with a cross-sectional sample of 337 early adolescents. School engagement was examined further as a proximal process that intervenes in the associations between internalizing and externalizing problems and achievement. Gender differences in these associations were assessed. As expected, internalizing problems showed stronger links with relational than with physical victimization and partially mediated the influence of both on engagement for girls but not boys. Externalizing problems partially mediated the influence of both subtypes of victimization on school functioning for girls and physical victimization for boys. Notably, engagement was a robust mediator of the contributions of internalizing problems and physical victimization to achievement for girls and externalizing problems to achievement for girls and boys. Findings also suggest that physical (but not relational) victimization partially mediates the link between internalizing and externalizing problems and school functioning

Changing the Social Contexts of Peer Victimization

Introduction: While school-based prevention programs often target deficits in individual children’s social skills in order to limit their aggression or exposure to peer victimization, there is increasing evidence that school-wide and classroom-level factors can affect the success of these programs. Method: We describe the WITS Primary Program which takes a community development approach for the prevention of victimization. It was designed for kindergarten to grade 3 students, and aims to create responsive communities for the prevention of peer victimization by engaging the support of parents, teachers, school counselors, olde

How children's justifications of the 'best thing to do' in peer conflicts relate to their emotional and behavioral problems in early elementary school

In this three-year longitudinal study, children were asked to choose the "best" strategy for dealing with hypothetical peer provocations and to justify "why" that was their choice at the end of first, second, and third grades. Teachers and parents also rated children's emotional and behavioral problems. Children's justifications were subjected to qualitative analyses to identify distinct content categories. These included getting others into trouble or avoiding it, dichotomous reasoning about good (kind) versus bad (mean) strategies, appeals to authorities for help, situation-specific solutions that anticipated consequences of actions, or general rules or solutions that could or should be used in similar conflicts to effect positive outcomes. These justification categories were related to the children's grade levels. Older children were more likely to use more story-specific justifications and to refer to the perspectives of others and to future consequences in their justification responses. Children who used justifications that involved getting others into trouble or avoiding it had higher levels of teacher ratings of concurrent emotional and behavioral problems at second and third grades and to parent ratings of emotional problems at third grade. © 2006 by Wayne State University Pres

A School-Randomized Clinical Trial of an Integrated Social–Emotional Learning and Literacy Intervention: Impacts After 1 School Year

Objective: To report experimental impacts of a universal, integrated school-based intervention in social– emotional learning and literacy development on change over 1 school year in 3rd-grade children’s social– emotional, behavioral, and academic outcomes. Method: This study employed a school-randomized, exper- imental design and included 942 3rd-grade children (49% boys; 45.6% Hispanic/Latino, 41.1% Black/African American, 4.7% non-Hispanic White, and 8.6% other racial/ethnic groups, including Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American) in 18 New York City public elementary schools. Data on children’s social–cognitive processes (e.g., hostile attribution biases), behavioral symptomatology (e.g., conduct problems), and literacy skills and academic achievement (e.g., reading achievement) were collected in the fall and spring of 1 school year. Results: There were main effects of the 4Rs Program after 1 year on only 2 of the 13 outcomes examined. These include children’s self-reports of hostile attributional biases (Cohen’s d 0.20) and depression (d 0.24). As expected based on program and developmental theory, there were impacts of the intervention for those children identified by teachers at baseline with the highest levels of aggression (d 0.32–0.59) on 4 other outcomes: children’s self-reports of aggressive fantasies, teacher reports of academic skills, reading achievement scaled scores, and children’s attendance. Conclusions: This report of effects of the 4Rs intervention on individual children across domains of functioning after 1 school year represents an important first step in establishing a better understanding of what is achievable by a schoolwide intervention such as the 4Rs in its earliest stages of unfolding. The first-year impacts, combined with our knowledge of sustained and expanded effects after a second year, provide evidence that this intervention may be initiating positive developmental cascades both in the general population of students and among those at highest behavioral risk