Schools, Rules, and Socialization Effects for Students: A Research Agenda

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

The school setting broadly affects students’ learning, attitudes, and academic and social behaviors through a set of formal and informal rules, patterns, and practices. As the social construct in which children and youth spend a large portion of their time, schools can aid in the development of risk and resilience across contexts and the life course; serve as punitive or stressful environments, or conversely as safe and supportive spaces; contribute to the production of equality or inequality in students’ outcomes; and serve an important role in the learning of social behaviors and identities. Participants will provide observations from the vantage of their research expertise, address how diverse research agendas add to our collective understanding, and engage in dialogue with session attendees.

This session emanates from an AERA/AIR research conference on the effects of school socialization, school discipline, and implicit and explicit rules and norms on children’s attitudes and learned behaviors. The conference convened approximately 25 scholars from a range of disciplines to focus on the current state of knowledge in these areas, different theoretical and methodological approaches used to address these topics, critical gaps in the research, and ways in which promising research from one domain might inform research in another. A forthcoming manuscript based on the conference will outline a broader empirical and interdisciplinary research agenda that can be used to provide direction and focus for future research.

Sub Unit

• AERA Sessions

Chair

• Nathan E. Bell, American Educational Research Association

Participants

• Allison Dymnicki, American Institutes for Research

• Kathryn R. Wentzel, University of Maryland

• Russell J. Skiba, Indiana University

• Ellen Cohn, University of New Hampshire

• Dorothy L. Espelage, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Discussants

• David M. Osher, American Institutes for Research

• Felice J. Levine, American Educational Research Association