New publication: Friendship fosters well-being, exclusion may hurt girls’ mathematics: a two-wave cross-lagged panel model of peer relations, affect, and achievement

SΛTIS member Tomáš Lintner has published a new study called Friendship fosters well-being, exclusion may hurt girls’ mathematics: a two-wave cross-lagged panel model of peer relations, affect, and achievement.

Drawing on a longitudinal panel design, the study distinguishes between two related but distinct dimensions of adolescent social experience: peer relations — encompassing both friendship and social exclusion — and affective well-being, defined as the balance of positive and negative emotional states that shape how students engage with their school environment.

Using cross-lagged panel models applied to a nationally stratified sample of 2,609 Czech students transitioning from Grade 6 to Grade 7, the authors examined reciprocal links between friendship, social exclusion, positive and negative affect, and academic achievement in mathematics and Czech language, assessed through item-response-theory-scaled tests. Friendship predicted increases in subsequent positive affect, while social exclusion was associated with affective decline. Exclusion further predicted lower achievement in Czech language across the full sample and reduced mathematics performance specifically among girls, indicating domain- and gender-differentiated patterns of academic vulnerability.

The findings suggest that the academic consequences of peer experiences depend not only on the presence of friendship but on the absence of exclusion — a distinction that carries particular weight for girls navigating performance demands in mathematics. Issues of social belonging — precisely because they shape the emotional conditions in which learning takes place — emerge as meaningful predictors of achievement trajectories. The results contribute to ongoing debates on adolescent development and raise questions about the structural and relational conditions that leave certain students academically at risk.

Read the full article here.