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Various theories from the field of educational psychology, including high expectation theory (HET) and self-determination theory (SDT), focus on the classroom conditions which facilitate students' motivation, learning, and well-being. In the current paper, we aimed to breech the theoretical division between HET and SDT through a synthesis of both theories. We identified multiple areas of convergence and complementarity. The teaching practices that are theorized to support students' motivation, learning, and well-being put forward by both HET and SDT show a high degree of conceptual overlap. Moreover, findings from both research fields suggest a gap between theory and practice: although the teaching principles put forward by both theories are believed to be effective for all students, not all teachers optimally apply these principles in their teaching or apply them equally for all classes or all students. Both theories acknowledge that teacher beliefs and contextual factors may account for this gap between theory and practice. In the paper, we put forward an integrative model to show how the two theories converge and complement each other. The integration of the two theories offers a way forward in terms of understanding and applying these two theoretical stances to the classroom.

Literature shows cooperative learning has positive benefits for students' learning and social outcomes. Even though cooperative learning studies have been conducted in all areas of the curriculum, few studies have investigated whether there are similar effects for students across several curriculum areas or age groups. Moreover, less attention has been given to how professional learning and development (PLD) opportunities can contribute to changes in instructional practice. We illustrate how research on cooperative learning can be translated into practice, through a one-year University-School partnership. The current study is focused on our PLD work in one large private school based in New Zealand. Analysis of school data (quantitative student data and qualitative teacher data) indicated that, by the end of the school year, students reported experiencing more cooperative learning opportunities in their classes. Teachers believed that the PLD supported change in their practice and noted positive changes in student engagement. Analysis of student data also revealed differential outcomes by subject and age group. Overall, our study showed that PLD opportunities can contribute to the successful implementation of cooperative learning.

Whether teachers maintain their expectation bias for students over time is crucial for understanding self-fulfilling prophecy effects. However, the stability of teacher expectation bias has been largely ignored in the literature. We examined the stability of teacher expectation bias across a sample of teachers and the change trajectories of teacher expectation bias across high-, medium-, and low-expectation teacher groups across all teachers and in the curriculum areas of mathematics, Chinese, and English. Our analyses were based on two-year longitudinal data with four time points from 567 Chinese senior high school students and their 50 teachers. The results showed that across all teachers, teacher expectation bias at the individual student level was dynamic over time. That is, teachers seemed to adjust their initial expectation bias in the first few months but then maintained the adjusted expectation bias afterwards. However, when students moved from Grade 11 to Grade 12 (the last year of high school), teachers seemed to change their expectation bias again. The evidence from HLM analyses further supported these results. That is, all the high- and low-expectation teachers alleviated their initial expectation bias significantly in the first six months and then adhered to their adjusted expectation bias. However, when students moved to the last year of high school, some high- and low-expectation teachers' expectation biases were volatile again. Nevertheless, most high- and low-expectation teachers (except for Chinese low-expectation teachers) tended to either over-estimate or under-estimate their students across two school years. Further, compared to Chinese and mathematics teachers, English teachers' biases seemed to be even more stable. Our findings suggested that some teachers consistently over- or under-estimated their students over an extended time period and this could have implications for student outcomes.

Purpose: This paper aims to convey and analyze participants' experience of an online mindfulness-based workplace wellness program, The Wellbeing Protocol, during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, with the aim of understanding the underlying mechanisms of how the program impacted stress, burnout and mental wellbeing. Design/methodology/approach: New Zealand teachers participated in an online mindfulness-based wellness program in 2020. Participants' experience was captured via focus groups and open-ended survey questions collected before, immediately after and three months following the intervention. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings: Three themes emerged--self-awareness and nonreactivity may facilitate a reduction in stress levels, the purposeful cultivation of self-care and positive emotions may be a precursor to enhanced wellbeing and positive relationships with others and evidence of effectiveness at work may mitigate burnout symptoms. Findings depicted effective strategies to improve wellbeing as well as promising areas for further research. Practical implications: For school settings--participants' positive appraisals of the program suggest The Wellbeing Protocol might be a suitable option to support teacher wellbeing. For workplaces: the positive outcomes related to improved effectiveness and relationships at work, as well as the program's flexibility related to its short length and online delivery, might make it a potential option to support employee wellbeing. Originality/value: To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the impact of a mindfulness-based intervention on New Zealand teachers, the first to explore the impact of the Wellbeing Protocol and one of few studies that have investigated an online mindfulness-based intervention. It has multiple qualitative data sources and a follow-up of three months.

This paper describes findings related to the effectiveness of secondary school middle leaders as a contributor to within-school variation in academic results for students at department level in urban high schools. The 'high-stakes' academic assessment results for students in 10 urban high schools in New Zealand in English, mathematics and science were collated over three years. The analyses revealed variable subject department performance by 16- to 18-year-old students in the national qualification within these schools. The extent of the effectiveness of the middle leadership practices in these departments was investigated using individual questionnaires for each middle leader and the teachers who reported to them. This paper reports the results of the statistical analyses of the questionnaire compared with the aggregated academic results for students by department and finds specific middle leadership practices that were strongly associated with improved academic results. In schools where students were socially disadvantaged, the statistical significance of the results was greater. This study contributes to the previous schooling improvement literature on department effectiveness by enhancing our understanding of why students in departments in the same high school perform differently and how effective middle leaders can impact positively the student academic outcomes.

This study aimed to explore and compare individual student-level and teacher-level teacher expectation effects on student academic achievement in the Chinese junior high school context. The participants were 50 teachers and their 1199 students from 10 junior high schools. With differences in student baseline achievement controlled, hierarchical linear modelling was employed to see if early-year teacher expectations predicted student year-end achievement. Results showed that both student- and teacher-level expectations (relative to achievement) positively predicted student academic achievement. Teacher expectations at the student level showed a stronger influence on student-achievement outcomes. The results also indicated that teachers tended to hold higher expectations for girls than for boys and were more likely to underestimate students who were children of migrant workers.

This article reports on the final phase of a three-phase project and investigates the characteristics of high-achieving students at a university. It also reports student evaluations of a low-cost program aimed at supporting them, assesses their levels of satisfaction, and evaluates the applicability of the program across three institutions in the tertiary sector in New Zealand. Quantitative data were collected from 126 participants prior to the introduction of the program and 55 participants were interviewed. End-of-year data were gathered via a questionnaire and one focus group interview. The findings indicated that the participants appeared to have stronger intrinsic motivation, resilience, and self-belief when compared with participants from other undergraduate groups participating in international studies. Interviewed participants expressed pleasure at being identified as high-achieving, appreciated their involvement in the study, and as a consequence were considering transitioning to postgraduate study. We concluded that this low-cost program was an effective strategy for supporting high-achieving undergraduate students across three different universities' departments and that other tertiary institutions might find the strategy useful.

Among school psycho-social factors with considerable effect on student outcomes are both school and classroom climate. Because how students perceive the classroom climate strongly predicts achievement, measuring classroom climate gains importance and the need for testing the existing results across cultures persists. In this study, we assessed the validity and measurement invariance of the Turkish adaptation of the Student Personal Perception of Classroom Climate Scale (SPPCC) developed in English (US). Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) and measurement invariance (MI) analyses by sex were performed on 629 students' data. CFA results confirmed the factorial structure of the SPPCC. Results of the MI analyses showed that the SPPCC measures the same construct for females and males in a non-English context. Latent mean comparisons revealed girls perceived the classroom climate more positively than boys. We concluded that this study in the Turkish context is a further step in developing evidence of the extent to which SPPCC provides psychometrically sound scores.

Teacher education has the potential to bring changes within educational systems that can shape the knowledge and skills of future generations. Teaching in a culturally responsive manner is an important part of developing teachers to serve as key change agents in transforming education and society through research, from the perspectives of student learning and achievement in health and physical education. It was expected in this study that students' recognition of cultural activities could inspire them to engage in physical education. The aim of the study was to examine student awareness of teaching that included cultural activities, with an emphasis on Cook Islands traditional cultural values. One hundred and one students and three teachers from three different schools participated in the study. Only 5% of the student population were non-Cook Islanders. A quantitative methodology was used to analyse the results and findings of the data using an initial Exploratory Factorial Analysis (EFA) and then group comparisons. The implications of identifying Cook Islands cultural values in the curriculum of physical education and what this means for teacher education are discussed.

Teacher expectation models have theorized that expectations are likely to affect student socio-psychological as well as academic outcomes. Effects on socio-psychological outcomes, however, have been less frequently studied. Further, ways in which teacher class-level over- or underestimation of students can contribute to relations with student beliefs have been seldom investigated. In a longitudinal study, relations between student reading achievement and student beliefs were explored, as were these relations for students with high and low expectation teachers. The participants were 31 teachers whose class-level expectations were more than 0.5 SD above or below their 692 students' beginning year achievement. Structural equation modeling showed that reading achievement and class-level teacher expectations predicted student self-reported teacher support and academic competence but not student reading self-concept, even though there were no differences in student reading achievement or beliefs at the beginning of the year. By end-of-year, students of high expectation teachers achieved at higher levels and held more positive beliefs than their underestimated counterparts. When multiple student beliefs were explored in one model, many of the paths between teacher class-level expectations, achievement, and student beliefs were indirect rather than direct. This implies a need for researchers to consider a range of student beliefs and relations with academic outcomes rather than a narrow focus on one belief construct as is common in the literature. The study also has practical implications in showing positive benefits for students when teachers have high class-level expectations.

Attitudes toward ethnic and racial identity have been linked to both wellbeing and maladaptive outcomes that affect belonging at school. Further, relatedness (or connectedness) as an indicator of school belonging has been positively associated with adaptive forms of motivation, acceptance of school, protection against risk factors, and scholastic success. Feelings of school belonging have varied among individuals from different ethnic-racial group and genders. In the current study, we employed cluster analysis to investigate how New Zealand Adolescents' ethnic-racial attitudinal profiles were associated with school relatedness for clusters overall, and among and within clusters by student gender. Differences were found for school belonging among the ethnic-racial cluster overall, with a notable advantage indicated for Multiculturalists (those accepting a diversity of cultural oeuvres). Notably, the adaptive role of identifying with at least one ethnic-racial identity and optimally, embracing other cultural outlooks too, was evidenced to enhance school belonging. Conversely, at least in the New Zealand context, eschewing ethnic-racial identity placed participants at risk of disengaging with school. In terms of within-cluster gender difference, in the Low Race Salience cluster (identified as maladaptive), males demonstrated a markedly lower sense of school belonging than females. Such findings have implications for teaching and learning, and future research to implement interventions enhancing school belonging.

The aim of this study was to understand why some students avoid seeking help when they find classwork difficult. We employed a qualitative methodology to discover the theories in use that described and explained what high school students did and did not do when they did not understand in math classes. After 5 classroom observations of students' help-seeking behavior, stimulated recall interviews were conducted with 18 students to compare the tacit reasoning of help-seeking and help-avoiding students. The findings from our study suggested that categorizing students as either help seekers or avoiders did not adequately capture the variation in their behavior. Rather, our analysis of students' theories in use enabled us to reveal the tensions they experienced between their learning goals and the psychological risks they associated with help seeking, and to draw connections between this tension system and their actual help-seeking behavior. For instance, students were much more likely to seek help privately than publicly, not because the help provided in private situations was more effective but because they anticipated fewer psychological risks. This study provides an initial proof of concept that some students' help seeking decisions may be the result of a set of complex forces, existing in a state of tension, rather than a more stable property of individuals. Furthermore, advancing our understanding of those forces may require better integration of qualitative and quantitative research.

Although studies on, and reviews of, class climate have flourished in the past decade, little is known about how student perceptions of the learning environment are associated with student psychosocial beliefs and outcomes at the tertiary level. The purpose of this paper is to synthesise the current body of literature and describe how the class climate area has developed over time, with a particular focus on tertiary climate studies and their underrepresentation in learning environments research. Throughout this review, it will be argued that reflection on five decades of research into learning environments reveals a number of gaps, such as the lack of attempts to conceptualise and evaluate the tertiary climate as a unique learning context, the under-representation of qualitative studies in the field, and the lack of studies that explored the potential influences of the tertiary climate on student psychosocial beliefs and outcomes.

This article explores the patterns of variation in the responses of talented, low-income students engaged in a program of undergraduate study. For this article, we focused on a subset of data from an earlier study of talented undergraduate students. Our aim was to add to the literature exploring the resilience of people from impoverished backgrounds that complete an undergraduate qualification, despite challenging circumstances. The data were collected from individual interviews with 10 participants, who also completed a demographic survey. Participants had not previously been identified as talented, nor, despite their consistently high achievement, did they consider themselves to be gifted or talented. Phenomenographic analysis of the interview transcripts revealed an outcome space that explained not only what the students had experienced, but also how they had experienced it. Implications for the retention and success of such students are discussed. Although this is a New Zealand study of talented, low-income, undergraduates, our findings may have application elsewhere.

In a narrative review we investigated teacher beliefs that moderate teacher expectation effects. An extensive literature search revealed that only three researchers had systematically examined (in at least three studies) teacher beliefs' differences and consequent expectation effects for students. Babad explored teachers who believed stereotypical information about students and showed how that bias translated into teacher-student interactions. Highly biased teachers had large negative self-fulfilling prophecy effects on student outcomes. Overall, the difference in contrasts between high and low bias teachers (those who did not accept stereotypes) was d = 0.92. Weinstein's research investigated teachers who believed all students should be treated similarly versus teachers who believed high and low achievers should be treated quite differently (low and high differentiating teachers). The average effect size of the differences between these teachers was d = 0.85. Rubie-Davies examined the idea that some teachers believe that all students can make large gains (high class-level expectations) whereas others believe their students will make little progress (low class-level expectations); the average effect size difference between high and low expectation teachers was d = 0.87. Hence, the review showed that effect size differences between these different teacher types were remarkably consistent, and all were large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to explore and compare the instructional practices and classroom interactions of teachers within the Chinese junior high school context who had correspondingly high or low expectations for all their students. Eight junior high school teachers and their 32 lessons were observed. Results of classroom observations revealed that high expectation teachers (teachers who had overall high expectations for their students relative to student achievement) made more orientation/focus statements and more statements referring to students' prior knowledge and learning experiences in their teaching compared with low expectation teachers (those with overall low expectations for their students relative to student achievement). High expectation teachers gave more class-level feedback and were more likely to question further and provide explanations when a student gave a correct answer. In situations when a student gave an incorrect answer or could not come up with an answer, high expectation teachers were more likely to give the student another chance by rephrasing/repeating the question, providing hints, or just asking the student to try again. These differences in high and low expectation teachers' instructional behaviours and the socio-emotional environment they created in their classrooms are discussed and implications for classroom teaching and teacher training are proposed.

The small-scale study reported here sought to ascertain the experiences of talented undergraduate students across four faculties within one university in New Zealand. Thirty-eight undergraduate participants from the four faculties were identified by 16 staff participants based on criteria used by the academic staff in their respective faculty, department, or school. Staff and students participated in separate focus groups so that their perceptions of talented students could be gained. Participant understandings of current identification methods and provision options for talented undergraduate students within the university environment were also sought. Talented undergraduate students identified existing practices that had enhanced, or in some instances had proved detrimental to, their learning. Students also shared ideas that they believed could be implemented to further enhance their experiences and learning. The implications of these findings are discussed with the intent of further enriching the future experiences of talented undergraduate students in the tertiary environment.

School choirs have been stigmatised for adolescent males in New Zealand, resulting in constraints in involvement, bullying, and threat to gender identity. In other national contexts, boys who sing in choirs have experienced a negative stereotype associated with accusations of inferior masculinity, yet little research has probed whether such forces are at play for their New Zealand counterparts. The current study was conducted with a sample of adolescent male school choir members in New Zealand (a country where essentialist gender attitudes have existed). Adolescent male choristers' perceptions of the gender stereotype, its moderation by cultural context, and how the stigmatised choral domain was negotiated, were explored within a framework of critical masculinities. Such a stereotype and wider implications for gendered structures found in society at large were confirmed. Personal and school-based factors enabling the male choristers' endurance in a domain that rendered their construction of masculinity subordinate, are discussed.

Boys continue to demonstrate lower average achievement in reading than girls. The influence of teacher gender has been explored among the factors explaining this scenario but with mixed results. Further, although teacher expectations have affected student academic outcomes, and student gender-related stereotypical notions have shaped such expectations, the role of teacher gender within this scenario has been neglected. The current study was conducted with a sample of elementary schools, in New Zealand (a national setting where essentialist gender attitudes have existed and where policies to implement scholastic gender equity have been critiqued as unsuccessful). The influence of teacher gender and of a teacher-student gender match and mismatch on teacher's expectations of their elementary student reading achievement, was tested via hierarchical linear modeling. Male teachers' expectations were found to be lower for students of both genders in reading and negative implications for male teachers and their students' reading achievement were revealed.