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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. Participants were 901 upper elementary students from 43 school classes at 15 public schools in Sweden who completed a questionnaire in their classrooms. The results showed that students who were less inclined to morally disengage in peer bullying tended to be more autonomously motivated to take the victim's side, which in turn was associated with greater defending and fewer pro-bullying behaviors. Introjected motivation to defend negatively mediated the association between moral disengagement and defending, and positively mediated moral disengagement's associations with passive bystanding and pro-bullying behavior. Extrinsic motivation to defend mediated moral disengagement's associations with passive bystanding and pro-bullying behavior. Finally, students who were more prone to morally disengage in peer bullying tended to be more amotivated to take the victim's side, which in turn was associated with greater pro-bullying behavior and less defending.

The present paper describes a quasi-experimental research presenting a workplace training program aimed at helping managers to be more supportive of their employees' autonomy. Drawing on self-determination theory, we built a pre/post questionnaire design measuring perceived autonomy support, need satisfaction, need frustration, autonomous motivation, controlled motivation, work engagement and job burnout. Seven managers were trained according to the autonomy support training program. We assessed 39 of their employees before and after the intervention. Moreover, 133 employees whose managers were not included in the training program constituted the control group. Regarding the experimental group, the results showed significant statistical differences regarding perceived autonomy support from managers, autonomous motivation, need satisfaction, work engagement and job burnout. No significant effects regarding perceived autonomy support from coworkers controlled motivation, or need frustration were observed. This study provides added value to the theory of need satisfaction and demonstrates that training managers to be need-supportive may be effective in improving positive work-related outcomes and reducing negative outcomes.

Highly responsive teachers tend to foster behaviors that are low in conflict and high in prosociality, among their students, leading to a positive classroom climate and to a decrease in bullying victimization. However, little is known about the interaction between teacher responsiveness and both student-teacher, and student-student relationship characteristics, in influencing students' bullying victimization at school. Here, we examined student-teacher relationship quality and students' likeability among peers as predictors of in-school victimization. Additionally, we investigated the moderating role of teacher responsiveness over this link. Study sample consisted of 386 early-adolescent students (55.2% female, mean age [SD] = 12.17 [0.73]) and 19 main teachers (females, n = 14). Findings indicated that students' exposure to victimization was positively associated with student-teacher conflict and negatively associated with likeability among classroom peers. Teacher responsiveness did not show a significant direct association with bullying victimization. However, when teachers showed high responsiveness, the strength of the association between student-teacher conflict and students' likelihood of bullying victimization was slightly increased. The present study highlights the importance of considering the role of teacher responsiveness when modeling the link between student and teacher relationship quality and in school bullying victimization.

Background: School bullying is a widespread phenomenon across the world, which involves bystanders who take on various roles. Motivation to defend victims is important to investigate because it helps us devise better, evidence-based, anti-bullying interventions. Objective: We aimed to determine whether students' behavioral and emotional strengths and difficulties and student-teacher relationships were associated with different types of motivation to defend victims of bullying. The hypotheses were (1) emotional and behavioral difficulties will be associated with less autonomous and introjected motivation to defend and greater extrinsic motivation to defend and (2) close student-teacher relationships will be associated with greater autonomous motivation to defend, and less extrinsic motivation to defend. Method: Data were collected from 483 Swedish early adolescents who completed a survey in their classrooms. Results: Results showed that, among boys and girls, close student-teacher relationships were positively associated with autonomous motivation and negatively associated with extrinsic motivation to defend, while negative expectations concerning teachers were associated with all forms of motivation to defend. Emotional and behavioral difficulties were only associated with introjected motivation to defend among girls. Furthermore, extrinsic motivation to defend was associated with the interactions between individual differences in behavioral and emotional difficulties and negative expectations. Conclusions: Adolescents who are more occupied with wanting to have a better relationship with their teachers might be motivated to be involved in good social relationships with others. The results also indicate that closeness in student-teacher relationships is important for greater autonomous motivation to defend victims during bullying.

Parents and teachers play an important role in stimulating student motivation. The aim of this study was to examine if both parent and teacher enthusiasm could predict intrinsic motivation toward STEM activities, and if motivation would be associated with improved STEM achievement over one year in a one-year prospective examination of 288 Swedish students in their final year of a Science High School program (143 females and 145 males). Surveys of parent and teacher enthusiasm were collected at baseline, and student intrinsic motivation and GPA in STEM were assessed at baseline and at the end of the year. Baseline GPA and intrinsic motivation as well as follow-up intrinsic motivation were significantly associated with later GPA. Finally, intrinsic motivation mediated the relation between teacher and parent enthusiasm and change in GPA. Findings show the importance of parent and teacher enthusiasm for adolescent's intrinsic motivation and achievement in STEM.

For years, a popular explanation for women choosing to abandon studies in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has been their lack of aptitude. This study challenged that notion by integrating theories of cognitive style, academic emotion, self-efficacy, and motivation to explain students' academic achievement and perseverance in STEM when transitioning to college. A sample of 1597 high school and junior college students participated. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were first conducted to validate a reduced version of the cognitive style questionnaire. Structural equation modeling revealed that the cognitive style known as systemizing indirectly predicted STEM achievement and persistence by way of intrinsic motivation, learning anxiety, and self-efficacy, providing a new perspective for re-examining the gender gap in STEM.

Purpose: Perceived support from co-workers and managers is important for many organizational outcomes. However, the benefit of competence support from colleagues and school management on personal teacher efficacy has not been investigated. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to investigate the impact of competence support from colleagues and the school management on growth in teacher efficacy and second, to investigate cultural differences (Canada and Sweden). Design/methodology/approach: The authors administered an inventory measuring support for competence and personal teacher efficacy to over 400 teachers in Canada and Sweden at 27 schools, at two times. Time 1 took place at the first week of a fall semester and Time 2 at the end of the same semester. Findings: Structural equation modeling revealed that competence support from colleagues predicted growth in teacher efficacy, whereas competence support from school management did not. No differences in these relations emerged between Canadian and Swedish teachers. Practical implications: The findings have implications for how schools organize teachers in teacher teams so that competence support from co-workers is promoted. Originality/value: This study is the first cross-cultural study to empirically show that teachers' self-efficacy is significantly benefitted by competence support from their teacher peers.

Authoritative school climates have been associated with less school bullying and other antisocial behaviors. However, studies focusing on the classroom level, as well as on bystander behaviors, are lacking. The aim of the current study was to examine whether authoritative classroom climates were associated with bullying victimization and various bystander behaviors (reinforcer, outsider, and defender behaviors) in school bullying. We included gender as a covariate at the individual and classroom levels. Participants were 1540 5th-grade students (824 girls) from 104 classrooms in Sweden who completed a questionnaire. The findings revealed that girls and students in classes with greater authoritative classroom climates were more inclined to defend. Boys reinforced more as did students in classes with more boys and more authoritative classroom climates. Boys showed more outsider behaviors as did students in classes with less authoritative classroom climates. Students in classrooms with less authoritative climates were victimized to a higher degree. Thus, the current findings suggest that a warm, caring, supportive, controlled, demanding, and cohesive classroom climate should be considered a vital protective factor against bullying victimization and negative bystander responses, and a facilitator of defending and supporting victims.

This study investigated the links between students' behavioral problems, student--teacher conflict, and students' involvement in bully, victim, and bully/victim roles in adolescence. The role of student-teacher conflict as moderator of the association between students' behavioral problems and their involvement in each bullying role was examined. Sample included 430 students from Italy (48.4% female; mean age 12.2 years; grades 6-8). Multinomial logistic regression analyses indicated that conduct problems positively predicted engagement in each bullying role, while peer-relationship problems predicted involvement in a victim role. Additionally, students experiencing higher student-teacher conflict were more likely of being victims and bully/victims, but not bullies. Finally, student-teacher conflict emerged as a moderator of the association between peer-relationship problems and both bully and victim roles, and between hyperactivity/inattention and victim role. These findings highlights the importance of considering students' characteristics in relation to student-teacher relationship quality when investigating the factors influencing students' involvement in bullying behaviors.

The aim of the present study was to focus on how students articulate and discuss what factors influence students' decisions to defend or not defend victims when witnessing bullying. In this unique qualitative cross-collaborative study, where two research teams collected interviews from two cultural contexts, eighty-nine students with an age-range from 9 to 14 years old participated. Participants included 43 Swedish students and 46 US students (50 girls, 39 boys). The interviews were analysed through a collaborative qualitative analysis aimed at constructing shared concepts of our data as a whole. The results revealed five broad factors among the students when they reasoned about how they act as a bystander in bullying situations: (a) informed awareness, (b) bystander expectations, (c) personal feelings, (d) behavioural seriousness, and (e) sense of responsibility. The results indicated that each of these considerations could make the students more or less likely to defend as well as to defend in a certain way. According to these five broad factors, students seemed to adjust their bystander acts, which suggests that students' bystander acts vary depending on situational factors that influence bystanders' interpretations of bullying and decision-making about how to respond to observed bullying.

Objective: The current study examined whether bullying victimization was associated with bringing a weapon to school, fully or partly mediated by feeling unsafe in school, negative future education orientation, and skipping school. Method: Data from 6199 students (12–18 years old), who had filled out the 2017 School Crime Supplement to the National Crime Victimization Survey, were analyzed. Results: The results showed a positive association between bullying victimization and bringing a weapon to school. The link was both direct and indirect through the mediating roles of feeling unsafe in school, having a negative future education orientation, and skipping school. Conclusion: Thus, victims of bullying tended to feel unsafe in school, have a negative future education orientation, and skip school—all of which were positively associated with bringing a weapon to school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Although callous-unemotional (CU) traits have been associated with bullying among children and adolescents, relatively little is known about whether each of the three sub-constructs of CU traits--callous, uncaring, and unemotional--are associated with bullying when they are considered concurrently in the analysis. Objective: This study was the first to examine in a single model whether callous, uncaring, and unemotional traits are directly related to the perpetration of bullying and to harm-effect moral reasoning in bullying among children as well as whether these three CU traits are indirectly related to bullying mediated by harm-effect moral reasoning. Methods: Self-reported data on CU traits, harm-effect moral reasoning in bullying situations, and bullying perpetration were collected from 381 children from 13 schools in Sweden. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses. Results: When all three sub-constructs of CU traits were included in a single model, greater callousness and uncaring were directly associated with greater bullying. In contrast, greater harm-effect moral reasoning was associated with less bullying. Moreover, greater callousness and unemotional were indirectly associated with greater bullying through the reduced use of harm-effect moral reasoning. Conclusions: Our findings demonstrate that all three CU traits are important to address, although their associations with bullying took some different paths, and that callousness appears to be the most important CU trait in relation to bullying.

Introduction: This research sought to extend knowledge about bystanders in bullying situations with a focus on the motivations that lead them to different responses. The 2 primary goals of this study were to investigate the reasons for children’s decisions to help or not to help a victim when witnessing bullying, and to generate a grounded theory (or conceptual framework) of bystander motivation in bullying situations.Methods: Thirty students ranging in age from 9 to 15 years (M=11.9; SD=1.7) from an elementary and middle school in the southeastern United States participated in this study. Open- ended, semistructured interviews were used, and sessions ranged from 30 to 45 minutes. We conducted qualitative methodology and analyses to gain an in-depth understanding of children’s perspectives and concerns when witnessing bullying.Results: A key finding was a conceptual framework of bystander motivation to intervene in bullying situations suggesting that deciding whether to help or not help the victim in a bullying situation depends on how bystanders define and evaluate the situation, the social context, and their own agency. Qualitative analysis revealed 5 themes related to bystander motives and included: interpretation of harm in the bullying situation, emotional reactions, social evaluating, moral evaluating, and intervention self-efficacy.Conclusion: Given the themes that emerged surrounding bystanders’ motives to intervene or abstain from intervening, respondents reported 3 key elements that need to be confirmed in future research and that may have implications for future work on bullying prevention. These included: first, the potential importance of clear communication to children that adults expect bystanders to intervene when witnessing bullying; second, the potential of direct education about how bystanders can interveneto increase children’s self-efficacy as defenders of those who are victims of bullying; and third, the assumption that it may be effective to encourage children’s belief that bullying is morally wrong. [West J Emerg Med. 2012;13(3):247–252.]

The first aim of the present study was to examine in a single model how moral disengagement and moral emotions were related to bullying and defending behavior among schoolchildren. The second aim was to test whether the two moral dimensions interacted with each other to explain behavior in bullying situations. Data were collected from 561 Swedish students. Moral disengagement was positively associated with bullying and negatively associated with defending, whereas moral emotions score was negatively associated with bullying and positively associated with defending. Moreover, students who scored high in moral emotions did not tend to bully other students, irrespective of their levels of moral disengagement, whereas when the moral emotions score was low bullying behavior increased with increasing levels of moral disengagement. In contrast, moral disengagement was negatively related to defending behavior at low levels of moral emotions, but not when moral emotions were high.

Research has shown that autonomy support has positive effects on academic development, but no study has examined how systemising cognitive orientation is related to important outcomes for science students, and how it may interact with autonomy support. This prospective investigation considered how systemising and support from teachers and parents influence motivation, self-efficacy and science performance of science students. Totally, two hundred and eighty eight high school students (143 females and 145 males) completed surveys at two times and records of their achievements were collected. Teachers' autonomy support and systemising were significantly positively related to motivation, self-efficacy and achievement over time, while parental support for autonomy was not directly related to the outcomes. Finally, two significant interaction effects showed that the relation of parental autonomy support to motivation and self-efficacy was moderated by systemising. This is the first study to demonstrate that autonomy support may be especially helpful for individuals with an intrinsic disposition in a domain.

Difficulties in attracting student teachers have resulted in research focusing on student teachers' motives for studying to join the profession. Because previous findings are mixed, the first aim of this study was to explore motives for students to become teachers. A second aim was to explore the relationship between teachers' motives and their academic engagement and dropout rates at the end of their studies. A sample of 333 student teachers at a Swedish university completed a questionnaire measuring motives for becoming a teacher and their academic engagement. The best model of a confirmatory factor analyses defined three motivational factors as altruistic, intrinsic and extrinsic motives. A path analysis showed a negative significant relationship between the altruistic motive and dropout, mediated by academic engagement, whereas the relationships between intrinsic and extrinsic motives and academic engagement were not significant.

The aim of the present study was to investigate how basic moral sensitivity in bullying, moral disengagement in bullying and defender self-efficacy were related to different bystander behaviors in bullying. Therefore, we examined pathways that linked students' basic moral sensitivity, moral disengagement, and defender self-efficacy to different bystander behaviors in bullying situations. Three hundred and forty-seven teenagers completed a bullying survey. Findings indicated that compared with boys, girls expressed higher basic moral sensitivity in bullying, lower defender self-efficacy and moral disengagement in bullying. Results from the SEM showed that basic moral sensitivity in bullying was negatively related to pro-bully behavior and positively related to outsider and defender behavior, mediated by moral disengagement in bullying, which in turn was positively related to pro-bully behavior and negatively related to outsider and defender behavior. What differed in the relations between outsider and defender behaviors was the degree of defender self-efficacy. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

The aim was to examine achievement and self-efficacy in mathematics and native and foreign language literacy in children with specific mathematic LD (MD-only), children with comorbid mathematic and reading difficulties (MD-RD), and compare them with children without LD (controls), as well as to explore gender differences. Participants were 143 fifth-graders in Sweden who completed National Tests and measures of self-efficacy in mathematics and literacy. The MD-RD children displayed lower self-efficacy in all subjects compared to the controls, even when controlling for achievement. The MD-only children displayed lower self-efficacy in mathematics, completely accounted for by their lower mathematic achievement. The lower self-efficacy for children with learning disabilities may primarily be explained by their history of low achievement interpreted as failures and their emphasis on negative appraisals. (Contains 2 tables.)

This article draws on a longitudinal and qualitative study of students in a master's program in engineering. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to analyze annual, semi-structured interviews with ten students, from the first semester until one year after graduation. The program enjoys a high status and has a reputation of being highly demanding. The results show how the students categorize themselves in relation to outgroups, and partly supports earlier research. The longitudinal design made it possible to study how students' social identities changed throughout their program, and when they went through a transition process to work. The graduated students developed an identity change, which involved a restructuring of the ways in which they understood their position in the social world.

Engineers face challenges when they are to manage project groups and be leaders for organisations because such positions demand skills in social competence and empathy. Previous studies have shown that engineers have low degrees of social competence skills. In this study, the level of empathy as measured by the four subscales of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, perspective taking, fantasy, empathic distress and empathic concern, among engineering students was compared to students in health care profession programmes. Participants were undergraduate students at Linkoping University, 365 students from four different health care profession programmes and 115 students from two different engineering programmes. When the empathy measures were corrected for effects of sex, engineering students from one of the programmes had lower empathy than psychology and social worker students on the fantasy and perspective-taking subscales. These results raise questions regarding opportunities for engineering students to develop their empathic abilities. It is important that engineering students acquire both theoretical and practical knowledge and skills regarding empathy. (Contains 3 tables.)

This study investigates the relationship between student influence and academic self-efficacy in a sample of 275 students in two Master's programmes in Engineering. Students in only one of the programmes studied according to problem-based learning (PBL). Results indicate that students choosing strategies to influence course content or structure, through course evaluation and recommending changes to teachers had significantly higher self-efficacy beliefs than those who did not use such strategies. It is principally the students who studied according to PBL that demonstrated higher self-efficacy beliefs, actively influenced their studies through engaging in debate with teachers. It can be claimed that increasing student self-efficacy beliefs is important not only in academic performance, but also in influencing in a positive way the institutional atmosphere. (Contains 3 tables.)

The focus in this paper is on how students experience their transition from their education to being employed as engineers in relation to the concept of employability. Four cohorts of students in a master's programme in engineering were monitored annually with a "follow-up" one year after graduation. Results show that there were differences in the way students talked about their curricular design, career plans, job search, becoming an employee and employable, and job satisfaction. Throughout the interviews certain turning points were identified, where the students had to make various decisions. Many students argued that generic skills and cultural values are best learned in extracurricular activities and in work contexts, and that doing a thesis project in a firm was the best learning experience. During this thesis process, students became conscious of their valuable employability skills, which in the job search process were a good thesis project, a diploma from the programme, self-efficacy, problem-solving skills and a broad knowledge base. On the job, the most valuable acquired key skills were considered to be mathematics and subject-specific knowledge, problem-solving skills, time management skills, learning skills, and an ability to manage stress and heavy workloads. (Contains 2 tables.)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between student influence, students' strategic approaches to studying and academic achievement, and to examine differences between students in a Master's programme in Engineering with conventional teaching and one based on problem-based learning in a sample of 268 students. A version of the Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students and a questionnaire measuring students' attempts to influence their study environment were used. The results showed that informal strategies for influencing the study environment and academic achievement were related to the strategic approach to studying, and that students in the programme based on problem-based learning employed more informal and social strategies to influence their studies. These findings indicate that an informal influence strategy is an aspect of the strategic approach to studying, and that problem-based learning could improve teacher-student relationships, increase the students' involvement and their use of strategic approaches to studying. (Contains 4 tables.)