title: Teachers' Promotion or Inhibition of Children's Aggression Depends on Peer-Group Characteristics.
abstract: Researchers have increasingly started to pay attention to how contextual factors, such as the classroom peer context and the quality of student-teacher interactions, influence children's aggressive behavior. This longitudinal study was designed to examine the degree to which benefits and costs of different teaching practices (child-centered and child-dominated) would be dependent on the initial peer-group composition (aggregate levels of aggression and victimization at the beginning of first grade). Teachers provided ratings of aggression and victimization (N = 523 first-grade students; M age at the beginning of first grade = 7.49 years, SD = 0.52). Information about different teaching practices was obtained via observations. Our results show that whereas child-centered practices are beneficial in high-victimization classrooms, child-dominated practices inhibit the development of aggression in low-victimization classroom contexts. Our findings highlight the importance of moving beyond main-effect models to studying how different contextual influences interact to promote, or inhibit, the development of aggression.
authors.affiliation: a Institute of Psychology , Tallinn University.|b Department of Psychology , Utrecht University.
authors.forename: Kätlin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Peets
authors.affiliation: a Institute of Psychology , Tallinn University.
authors.forename: Eve
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2337-8930
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Kikas
mesh_terms: D000374:Aggression / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D019548:Crime Victims / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D010379:Peer Group; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology*