Middle School Conditions that Promote Early Adolescent Thriving

The focal question of this three-paper dissertation asks: What are the school conditions that foster academic success alongside social emotional development for early adolescent thriving? To pursue this question, I explored a range of school conditions, some that existed because an intervention was in place and others that reflect natural variation that exists in middle schools. In the first paper, I examined two school conditions, namely EL Education and comparison schools to understand if and how they differ in providing meaningful learning experiences, especially for Black and Latine students. In Paper 2, I studied students’ perception of teacher caring and school belonging to examine how those experiences contributed to growth in prosocial competencies over two years. In Paper 3, I examined Black students’ perceptions of equitable school climate and the extent to which those perceptions influenced the relationship between racial identity beliefs and academic engagement. Taken together, these studies shed light on school conditions to support thriving youth and to mitigate systemic opportunity gaps, such as gaps in meaningful learning experiences and engagement. I studied multiple aspects of school conditions by investigating early adolescent perspectives on meaningful learning, teacher caring, belonging, discrimination experiences, and perceptions of fairness and equity. Teacher caring (Audley & Ginsburg, 2019; Gasser et al., 2018; Roorda et al., 2011) and belonging (Allen et al., 2018; Gray et al., 2018; Korpershoek et al., 2020) are well established indicators of academic success and psychological wellbeing. Beyond these two aspects of school conditions, I include equity-oriented school experiences, which are often left out of school climate literature (Byrd, 2019; Roeser et al., 2000; Wang & Degol, 2016). For instance, experiences of discrimination from peers and teachers are frequently overlooked in school climate research broadly, though they are all-too-common experiences that influence students’ thriving (e.g., discrimination and unfairness have negative outcomes; Civitillo et al., 2023). Therefore, this dissertation research will contribute to understanding multifaceted, complex school conditions, including school and classroom interactions (e.g., teacher caring and belonging) and broadening the scope to include sociopolitical contexts (e.g., meaningful education about real world issues that contribute to sociopolitical development, experiences of discrimination from peers and teachers, perceptions of fairness, equitable treatment in learning opportunities and discipline practices).