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Past research and theory suggest that youth aggression is maladaptive, caused by factors such as cognitive bias, personal defect, or frustration. We sought to identify the extent and circumstances in which aggression is socially adaptive in the school context, by conducting a systematic review and meta-analysis of the links between youth aggression and peer nominations of popularity and likeability. Bayesian multilevel meta-analysis was used to analyse 1,133 effects from 255 studies with a total of 556,363 participants in elementary, middle, and high school. Aggression was negatively associated with likability: -0.28 [95% credibility interval (CrI): -0.41 -0.13] and positively associated with popularity: 0.16 [95% CrI: 0.06 0.25], regardless of the type of aggression and several other possible moderators. We discuss the implications of these findings for aggression interventions and highlight the importance of acknowledging the upsides of aggression for youth, measuring, and targeting indirect aggression.

Educational psychology usually focuses on explaining phenomena. As a result, researchers seldom explore how well their models predict the outcomes they care about using best-practice approaches to predictive statistics. In this paper, we focus less on explanation and more on prediction, showing how both are important for advancing the field. We apply predictive models to the role of teachers on student engagement: the thoughts, attitudes, and behaviours that translate motivation into progress. We integrate the suggestions from four prominent motivational theories, and aim to identify those most critical behaviours for predicting changes in students’ engagement in physical education. Students (N = 1,324 all from Year 7, 52% girls) from 17 low socio-economic status schools rated their teacher’s demonstration of 71 behaviours in the middle of the school year. We also assessed students’ engagement at the beginning and end of the year. We trained elastic-net regression models on 70% of the data and then assessed their predictive validity on the held-out data (30%). The models showed that teacher behaviours predicted 4.39% of the variance in students’ change in engagement. Some behaviours that were most consistently associated with a positive change in engagement were being good role models (β = 0.046), taking interest in students’ lives outside of class (β = 0.033), and allowing students to make choices (β = 0.029). The influential behaviours did not neatly fit within any single motivational theory. These findings support arguments for integrating different theoretical approaches, and suggest practitioners may want to consider multiple theories when designing interventions. More generally, we argue that researchers in educational psychology should more frequently test how well their models not just explain, but predict the outcomes they care about.

Children’s engagement in screen time is a complex issue. While some forms of screen time have consistently been associated with harm, others have been associated with gains, making it difficult to weigh the risks and benefits of use. In this umbrella review, we systematically collate and synthesise meta-analyses examining the effects of screen use on children and youth. We converted results onto a common metric to make comparisons simple, and where possible we reanalysed study-level data to standardise the approach across meta-analyses. We identified 116 meta-analyses, and extracted 165 unique exposure/outcome combinations. These effects represent the findings of 2,171 primary studies comprised of 1,652,944 participants. When focusing on the meta-analyses with the most statistically robust evidence, we found that general screen use (when content was not indicated), was associated with potentially harmful impacts on learning, literacy, body composition, and depression. Like-wise, social media was consistently associated with risks to health, with no identified benefits. However, we also found that these harms could often be mitigated by certain kinds of content (e.g., educational), or by modifying the context (e.g., co-viewing with a parent). In summary, our findings point to the need for careful and nuanced guidelines that support parents to make the best decisions for their children.

Mastery-approach (MAP) goals, focusing on developing competence and acquiring task mastery, is posited to be the most optimal, beneficial type of achievement goal for academic and life outcomes. Although there is meta-analytic evidence supporting this finding, such evidence does not allow us to conclude that the extant MAP goal findings generalize across cultures. Meta-analyses have often suffered from over-representation of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) samples, reliance on bivariate correlations, and lack the ability to directly control individual-level background variables. To address these limitations, this study used nationally representative data from 80 societies (N= 612,004 adolescents) to examine the relations of MAP goals to four personality antecedents (workmastery, competitiveness, fear of failure, and mindset) and 16 consequences (i.e., task-specific motivational, achievement-related, and well-being outcomes), and tested the cross-cultural generalizability of these relations. Results showed that MAP goals were: (a) grounded primarily in positive (workmastery, competitiveness) but not negative achievement motives (fear of failure, fixed mindset); (b) most strongly predictive of well-being outcomes (e.g., life satisfaction, resilience), followed by adaptative motivational (e.g., enjoyment, perceived competent) and achievement-related (e.g., test performance, educational aspirations) outcomes; (c) weakly negatively associated with maladaptive outcomes (perceived task difficulty); and (d) uniquely predictive of various consequences, controlling for the personality antecedents and covariates. Further, the results of four different approaches provide consistent, strong support for cross-cultural generalizability of these relations, which has practical implications regarding the benefits of MAP goal pursuit in daily life and directions for educational intervention in a global context.

Current victimization studies and meta-analyses are based mainly on a unidimensional perspective in a few developed OECD countries. This provides a weak basis for generalizability over multiple victimization (relational, verbal, physical) components and different countries. We test the cross-national generalizability (594,196 fifteen-year-olds; 77 countries) of competing victimization models. In support of our three-component model, differentiating the multiple components of victimization facilitated understanding: gender differences (girls experience less physical and verbal victimization and stronger anti-bullying attitudes, but relational differences are small); paradoxical anti-bullying attitudes (physical victims have less –not more--anti-bullying attitudes); and well-being (policy/practice focuses primarily on physical victimization, but verbal and relational victimization effects are larger). These key findings provide theoretical advances with implications for policy, practice, and intervention.

The rapid introduction of University remote learning due to COVID19 raised concerns of poorer educational outcomes, especially for at-risk students. Comparing satisfaction (n=33,029) and marks (n=128,823) in the first online unit to the previous three years, multilevel models ascertain the effect of remote learning with comprehensive controls, and test equity and curricula moderators. Results indicate significant small decrements in satisfaction and an increase in marks; effects so small as to be insubstantial. No highly dissatisfied or poorly performing student sub-groups were identified. While not all education aspects are measured, this high-level comparison indicates a successful initial transition to remote learning.

We explore whether decentralization of decision-making influences school principals’ subjective experience of autonomy, job demands, burnout, and job satisfaction. Using six-years of longitudinal data, we used two Australian education reforms as a natural experiment of the effect of decentralization. Exploiting state-to-state variation in the policies, we used difference-in-differences models, finding that the decentralization policies had a small influence on increasing self-perceptions of autonomy without increasing job demands. We also found that the policies had a small positive effect on job satisfaction.