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Previous research indicates that imagining contact with someone who is an immigrant can reduce prejudice and promote positive friendship intentions. Much less is known about the optimal ways of effecting imagined contact. The reported research used an experimental design, where the status of a target-child toy puppet (immigrant versus refugee versus control) and the type of imagined contact (2D or 3D figures) was changed. Children aged 4-10 years, were tested for their responses towards immigrants and refugees, before and after a three-minute interactive play session with 2D or 3D toy puppet figures. Children were asked to show in the session how they would 'have a really good time' with the target-child toy puppet. Measures of children's direct contact with immigrants were also taken. The results suggest that 3D figures have a similar positive impact as 2-D figures on friendship intentions following imagined play. It was in the 2D experimental conditions only that children's friendship intentions were more positive with greater anxiety reduction.

What: Regarding education, disability inequality is arguably a structural and systemic issue. The social model of disability, enshrined in teacher education programs in the UK, espouses the ways in which school environments, rather than disabled children themselves, need to adapt and change. However, the role of psychology in addressing disability-related systemic injustice is less clear. The aim of this paper is to consider the potential role of the psychology of education in working towards disability justice in schools. Why? Many inclusive teacher-education programmes set out the ways in which environments may be created to include disabled children. Psychologists have focused on disabled children's needs to access and participate in the classroom, but often do not consider their exclusion in social model terms, from curriculum materials, classroom displays, or material culture more generally. Favazza and colleagues (e.g. 2017) now offer a sizeable body of research showing that disability representation in school classrooms is negligible. This lack of representation is reflected among the staff in the teaching profession, where the 2016 census suggests that 0.5% of English teaching staff declared a disability (DfE, 2017), and more recent census data show that disability data were not collected (DfE, 2023a). It is this lack of representation of disabled people and its possible psychological underpinnings that this paper addresses. How? This paper uses social and affirmative model lenses to (a) explore the ways in which disability may be seen as a structural inequality in contemporary UK education and (b) suggest ways in which researchers and practitioners in the Psychology of Education may work towards disability justice. This may be achieved by considering extant research practice and through research focusing on the perceptions of and attitudes towards disability, alongside existing psychological work that focuses on disabled children's individual needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students studying at universities in England have been defined as customers by the government since the introduction of student tuition fees. Although this approach has been rejected by educators, there is a lack of empirical evidence about the extent to which students express a consumer orientation and its effects on academic performance. These issues were examined in the current study by surveying 608 undergraduates at higher education institutions in England about their consumer attitudes and behaviours in relation to their higher education, learner identity, and academic performance. The analysis revealed that consumer orientation mediated traditional relationships between learner identity, grade goal and academic performance, and found that a higher consumer orientation was associated with lower academic performance. Furthermore, responsibility for paying tuition fees and studying a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics subject were associated with a higher consumer orientation and subsequently lower academic performance. Implications for academic performance are discussed.

Social-psychological dimensions of learning are under-researched, but they affect student achievement. Within a marketized higher education context in England, United Kingdom, this study examined whether the relation between students' social identities as members of their discipline and academic achievement could be further understood by considering the mediating roles of approaches to learning and frequency of making course complaints. Undergraduates (N = 679) completed a questionnaire to assess these constructs. As expected, approaches to learning and course complaining both acted as serial mediators of the link between discipline identification and academic achievement: stronger discipline identification was related to more deep approaches to learning, less complaining, and higher achievement, whereas weaker discipline identification was related to more surface approaches to learning, more complaining, and lower achievement. The findings suggest that addressing these social-psychological aspects of learning could improve students' academic achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractEngaging with feedback has been widely shown to support learning, but levels of engagement with feedback among individual students varies considerably. This study assessed educational identities to understand this variation, while also seeking to confirm the distinct but related role of perceptions of feedback. One hundred and seventy undergraduate students in the UK completed an online questionnaire to assess their perceptions of feedback, engagement with feedback, learner identity, consumer identity, and discipline identity, as well as provide age, gender, ethnicity, and level of study. As predicted, perceptions of feedback was significantly positively correlated with engagement with feedback, and learner identity and discipline identity were also significantly positively correlated with perceptions of feedback and engagement with feedback. Data were subsequently analysed to test various hypotheses about the interactions among these variables. Critically, we found support for the proposed mediating effect of perceptions of feedback on the relation between learner identity and engagement with feedback, however, consumer identity did not moderate this effect. These findings suggest that students who demonstrate the greatest engagement with feedback are those with a strong learner identity, thus, interventions to promote learner identity may increase students’ engagement with feedback and ultimately improve their outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Workplace bullying has been widely researched due to the negative effects it has on employees' psychological well-being and job satisfaction. At the same time, social identity theory has been applied to the study of work place bullying as a potential means to understand and reduce the experience of it. In this study, participants (N=65) took part in an online questionnaire where experiences of bullying, social identity, and job satisfaction were measured. Analyses indicated that social identity fully mediates the association between bullying and job satisfaction, such that experience of workplace bullying leads to a reduction in social identification, and a resultant increase in job satisfaction. The implications of these findings for a social identity account of workplace bullying, and the ways in which these findings might inform workplace anti-bullying interventions are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]