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Previous research suggests that math anxiety, or feelings of apprehension about math, leads individuals to engage in math avoidance behaviors that negatively impact their future math performance. However, much of the research on this topic explores global avoidance behaviors in situations where math can be avoided entirely rather than more localized avoidance behaviors that occur within a mathematics context. Since the option to completely avoid math is not common in most formal education systems, we investigated how and if math avoidance behaviors manifest for math-anxious high school students enrolled in math courses. Given previous research highlighting the utility of effortful study strategies as well as recent findings identifying a relation between math anxiety and the avoidance of math-related effort, we hypothesized that math anxiety would be associated with decreased planned engagement of effortful study strategies by students and that such effort avoidance would result in worse performance on a high-stakes mathematics exam. We found (N = 190) that the majority of students ranked problem-solving as the most effortful study strategy and that math anxiety was associated with less planned engagement with effortful problem-solving during studying. Moreover, the avoidance of effortful problem-solving engagement partially mediated the association between math anxiety and exam performance, marking it as a potential target for intervention. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

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OBJECTIVE: A sense of belonging-the subjective feeling of deep connection with social groups, physical places, and individual and collective experiences-is a fundamental human need that predicts numerous mental, physical, social, economic, and behavioural outcomes. However, varying perspectives on how belonging should be conceptualised, assessed, and cultivated has hampered much-needed progress on this timely and important topic. To address these critical issues, we conducted a narrative review that summarizes existing perspectives on belonging, describes a new integrative framework for understanding and studying belonging, and identifies several key avenues for future research and practice. METHOD: We searched relevant databases, including Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, PsycInfo, and ClinicalTrials.gov, for articles describing belonging, instruments for assessing belonging, and interventions for increasing belonging. RESULTS: By identifying the core components of belonging, we introduce a new integrative framework for understanding, assessing, and cultivating belonging that focuses on four interrelated components: competencies, opportunities, motivations, and perceptions. CONCLUSION: This integrative framework enhances our understanding of the basic nature and features of belonging, provides a foundation for future interdisciplinary research on belonging and belongingness, and highlights how a robust sense of belonging may be cultivated to improve human health and resilience for individuals and communities worldwide.

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A solid foundation in math is important for children's long-term academic success. Many factors influence children's math learning-including the math content students are taught in school, the quality of their instruction, and the math attitudes of students' teachers. Using a large and diverse sample of first-grade students (n = 551), we conducted a large-scale replication of a previous study (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 2010, 1860; n = 117), which found that girls in classes with highly math anxious teachers learned less math during the school year, as compared to girls whose math teachers were less anxious about math. With a larger sample, we found a negative relation between teachers' math anxiety and students' math achievement for both girls and boys, even after accounting for teachers' math ability and children's beginning of year math knowledge, replicating and extending those previous results. Our findings strengthen the support for the hypothesis that teachers' math anxiety is one factor that undermines children's math learning and could push students off-track during their initial exposure to math in early elementary school.

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PURPOSE: The COVID-19 pandemic presents unique challenges for adolescents because of disruptions in school and social life. We compiled a diverse group (36.8% nonwhite or multiracial) of high schoolers' open-ended responses to the question: "What are your three biggest challenges right now?" (N = 719 adolescents). METHODS: Using open and axial coding, we identified N = 1,902 thematic units (M = 2.64, SD = .701) and 14 thematic categories, including mental health, physical health, family, friends, social connection and community, academics, missing important events, socioeconomic issues, routine, COVID rules and adjustment, contraction/exposure to COVID, technology, and future plans. RESULTS: Adolescents most commonly reported challenges related to academics (23.7%) but also cited high numbers of challenges in mental (14.8%) and physical (13.2%) health and friend (11.4%) domains. CONCLUSIONS: Efforts should focus on helping adolescents cultivate academic skills needed during school closures, providing mental/physical health resources and helping them navigate peer relationships-especially given ongoing remote education and social distancing due to the pandemic.

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Math anxiety-negative feelings toward math-is hypothesized to be associated with the avoidance of math-related activities such as taking math courses and pursuing STEM careers. However, there is little experimental evidence for the math anxiety-avoidance link. Such evidence is important for formulating how to break this relationship. We hypothesize that math avoidance emerges when one perceives the costs of effortful math engagement to outweigh its benefits and that this perception depends on individual differences in math anxiety. To test this hypothesis, we developed an effort-based decision-making task in which participants chose between solving easy, low-reward problems and hard, high-reward problems in both math and nonmath contexts. Higher levels of math anxiety were associated with a tendency to select easier, low-reward problems over harder, high-reward math (but not word) problems. Addressing this robust math anxiety-avoidance link has the potential to increase interest and success in STEM fields.

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The period of early adolescence is characterized by dramatic changes, simultaneously affecting physiological, psychological, social, and cognitive development. The physical transition from elementary to middle school can exacerbate the stress and adversity experienced during this critical life stage. Middle school students often struggle to find social and emotional support, and many students experience a decreased sense of belonging in school, diverting students from promising academic and career trajectories. Drawing on psychological insights for promoting belonging, we fielded a brief intervention designed to help students reappraise concerns about fitting in at the start of middle school as both temporary and normal. We conducted a district-wide double-blind experimental study of this approach with middle school students (n = 1,304). Compared with the control condition activities, the intervention reduced sixth-grade disciplinary incidents across the district by 34%, increased attendance by 12%, and reduced the number of failing grades by 18%. Differences in benefits across demographic groups were not statistically significant, but some impacts were descriptively larger for historically underserved minority students and boys. A mediational analysis suggested 80% of long-term intervention effects on students' grade point averages were accounted for by changes in students' attitudes and behaviors. These results demonstrate the long-term benefits of psychologically reappraising stressful experiences during critical transitions and the psychological and behavioral mechanisms that support them. Furthermore, this brief intervention is a highly cost-effective and scalable approach that schools may use to help address the troubling decline in positive attitudes and academic outcomes typically accompanying adolescence and the middle school transition.

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Educational attainment is one lever that can increase opportunity for economically disadvantaged families-especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). Unfortunately, students from lower-income backgrounds often perform poorly and fail high school STEM courses, which are a necessary step in pursuing fast-growing and lucrative STEM careers, graduating high school, and matriculating to college. We reasoned that, because high school STEM courses often use high-stakes tests to gauge performance, and such tests can be especially stressful for lower-income students, interventions that help students regulate their negative emotions during tests should reduce the achievement gap between higher- and lower-income students. In a large-scale (n = 1,175) field experiment conducted in ninth grade science classrooms, students were asked to complete a control exercise, or they were given the opportunity to complete an exercise to help them regulate their worries and reinterpret their anxious arousal before their tests. We found significant benefits of emotion regulation activities for lower-income students in terms of their science examination scores, science course passing rate, and students' attitudes toward examination stress, suggesting that students' emotions are one factor that impacts performance. For example, 39% of lower-income students failed the course in the control group compared with only 18% of students failing the course if they participated in the emotion regulation interventions-a reduction in course failure rate by half. Our work underscores the crucial importance of targeting students' emotions during impactful points in their academic trajectories for improving STEM preparedness and enhancing overall academic success.

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Although it is important to accurately assess and promote student achievement, it is also critical to accurately assess and promote student social and emotional well-being and positive attitudes about school. Recent research has shown the promise of school-based interventions to improve certain student academic attitudes but has also raised concerns about a lack of reliable measures of these attitudes for early adolescents. We compiled the Malleable Social-Psychological Academic Attitudes (MSPAA) survey to measure school trust, social belonging, evaluation anxiety, self-complexity, locus of control, and identification with school. We adapted MSPAA measures to make them more appropriate for early adolescents in the school context, assessed the measurement properties of the MSPAA survey, and examined how student responses differed based on various demographic factors. We found that this brief survey reliably measured these constructs among early adolescents (N = 2158). Additionally, differences by grade level, school context, gender, and racial group revealed insightful patterns of variation that have implications for social and psychological theory, as well as for practices in schools. We close by suggesting further study of this survey for use among education researchers and within schools.

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Although parents' fears and worries about math-termed math anxiety-are negatively associated with their children's math achievement in early elementary school, access to an educational math app that 1st-grade children and parents use together can ameliorate this relation. Here we show that children of higher-math-anxious parents learn less math during 1st-3rd grades, but this is not the case when families are given a math app (even after app use markedly decreases). Reducing the link between parents' math anxiety and their positive attitudes about math for their children helped to explain the sustained benefit of the math app. These findings indicate that interventions involving parents and children together can have powerful lasting effects on children's academic achievement and suggest that changes in parents' expectations for their children's potential for success in math, and the value they place on this success, play a role in these sustained effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

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Self-affirmation shows promise for reducing racial academic-achievement gaps; recently, however, mixed results have raised questions about the circumstances under which the self-affirmation intervention produces lasting benefits at scale. In this follow-up to the first district-wide scale-up of a self-affirmation intervention, we examined whether initial academic benefits in middle school carried over into high school, we tested for differential impacts moderated by school context, and we assessed the causal effects of student engagement with the self-affirming writing prompted by the intervention. Longitudinal results indicate that self-affirmation reduces the growth of the racial achievement gap by 50% across the high school transition ( N = 920). Additionally, impacts are greatest within school contexts that cued stronger identity threats for racial minority students, and student engagement is causally associated with benefits. Our results imply the potential for powerful, lasting academic impacts from self-affirmation interventions if implemented broadly; however, these effects will depend on both contextual and individual factors.

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In the context of concerns about American youths' failure to take advanced math and science (MS) courses in high school, we examined mothers' communication with their adolescent about taking MS courses. At ninth grade, U.S. mothers (n = 130) were interviewed about their responses to hypothetical questions from their adolescent about the usefulness of algebra, geometry, calculus, biology, chemistry, and physics. Responses were coded for elaboration and making personal connections to the adolescent. The number of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses taken in 12th grade was obtained from school records. Mothers' use of personal connections predicted adolescents' MS interest and utility value, as well as actual MS course-taking. Parents can play an important role in motivating their adolescent to take MS courses.

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Brief, targeted self-affirmation writing exercises have recently been offered as a way to reduce racial achievement gaps, but evidence about their effects in educational settings is mixed, leaving ambiguity about the likely benefits of these strategies if implemented broadly. A key limitation in interpreting these mixed results is that they come from studies conducted by different research teams with different procedures in different settings; it is therefore impossible to isolate whether different effects are the result of theorized heterogeneity, unidentified moderators, or idiosyncratic features of the different studies. We addressed this limitation by conducting a well-powered replication of self-affirmation in a setting where a previous large-scale field experiment demonstrated significant positive impacts, using the same procedures. We found no evidence of effects in this replication study and estimates were precise enough to reject benefits larger than an effect size of 0.10. These null effects were significantly different from persistent benefits in the prior study in the same setting, and extensive testing revealed that currently theorized moderators of self-affirmation effects could not explain the difference. These results highlight the potential fragility of self-affirmation in educational settings when implemented widely and the need for new theory, measures, and evidence about the necessary conditions for self-affirmation success.

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During high school, developing competence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is critically important as preparation to pursue STEM careers, yet students in the United States lag behind other countries, ranking 35th in mathematics and 27th in science achievement internationally. Given the importance of STEM careers as drivers of modern economies, this deficiency in preparation for STEM careers threatens the United States' continued economic progress. In the present study, we evaluated the long-term effects of a theory-based intervention designed to help parents convey the importance of mathematics and science courses to their high-school-aged children. A prior report on this intervention showed that it promoted STEM course-taking in high school; in the current follow-up study, we found that the intervention improved mathematics and science standardized test scores on a college preparatory examination (ACT) for adolescents by 12 percentile points. Greater high-school STEM preparation (STEM course-taking and ACT scores) was associated with increased STEM career pursuit (i.e., STEM career interest, the number of college STEM courses, and students' attitudes toward STEM) 5 y after the intervention. These results suggest that the intervention can affect STEM career pursuit indirectly by increasing high-school STEM preparation. This finding underscores the importance of targeting high-school STEM preparation to increase STEM career pursuit. Overall, these findings demonstrate that a motivational intervention with parents can have important effects on STEM preparation in high school, as well as downstream effects on STEM career pursuit 5 y later.

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Frank presents an alternative interpretation of our data, yet reports largely similar results to those in our original Report. A critical difference centers on how to interpret and test interaction effects. Frank finds no mistakes in our analyses. We stand by our original conclusions of meaningful effects of the Bedtime Learning Together (BLT) math app on children's math achievement.

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The pipeline toward careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) begins to leak in high school, when some students choose not to take advanced mathematics and science courses. We conducted a field experiment testing whether a theory-based intervention that was designed to help parents convey the importance of mathematics and science courses to their high school-aged children would lead them to take more mathematics and science courses in high school. The three-part intervention consisted of two brochures mailed to parents and a Web site, all highlighting the usefulness of STEM courses. This relatively simple intervention led students whose parents were in the experimental group to take, on average, nearly one semester more of science and mathematics in the last 2 years of high school, compared with the control group. Parents are an untapped resource for increasing STEM motivation in adolescents, and the results demonstrate that motivational theory can be applied to this important pipeline problem.

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