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Emotionally supportive classrooms represent an important interactional context for the development of positive perceptions of student–teacher relationships. The present study investigated how students' perceptions of teacher care and justice develop over the upper elementary grades. Moreover, we studied to what degree teachers' observed emotional support predicts changes in perceptions of teacher care and justice in students with and without risks for academic failure. The study consisted of 1209 upper elementary grade students who were followed from grade five (T1) to grade six (T2, 1009 students). Multilevel analyses revealed that, over the year, student perceptions of their teacher as caring decreased in classrooms with low-quality teacher-student interactions in the emotional domain. Moreover, high emotional support from teachers protected students with high academic disengagement from developing negative perceptions of teacher justice. These results suggest a protective function of teacher's emotional support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We investigated relations between children''s moral judgments and moral emotions following disability-based exclusion and inclusive education, age, and contact intensity. Nine- and 12-year-old Swiss children (N =351) from inclusive and noninclusive classrooms provided moral judgments and moral emotion attributions following six vignettes about social exclusion of children with disabilities. Children also reported on their level of sympathy towards children with disabilities and their contact intensity with children with disabilities. Overall, children condemned disability-based exclusion, attributed few positive emotions to excluder targets, and expressed high sympathy for children with disabilities, independent of age and educational setting. However, younger children from inclusive classrooms exhibited more moral judgments and moral emotions than younger children from noninclusive classrooms. Moreover, children who expressed high sympathy towards children with disabilities were more likely to report frequent contact with children with disabilities. The findings extend existing research on social exclusion by examining disability-based exclusion and are discussed with respect to developmental research on social and moral judgments and emotions following children''s inclusion and exclusion decisions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We investigated effects of classroom-level norms and individual competitive attitudes on children's exclusion of hypothetical peers with behavior or academic difficulties. Upper elementary school children (N = 1009) from Switzerland were presented with four scenarios about social exclusion at two time points (fifth and sixth grade). These scenarios varied according to difficulty type of exclusion target (low-achieving vs. hyperactive) and context of exclusion (academic vs. social). Multilevel analyses revealed that children were more likely to exclude hypothetical hyperactive peers than low-achieving peers for reasons of effective group functioning. When children transferred to the sixth grade, they became more likely to coordinate the type of difficulty of the exclusion target with the context of exclusion. Moreover, competitive classroom-level norms and individual attitudes positively predicted the exclusion of low-achieving children. To improve social inclusion, teachers can encourage learning environments, where children learn to integrate effective academic group functioning with fairness principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]