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The goal of this study was to examine differences in university success between first-year students by analyzing three domains simultaneously: students' academic achievement, critical thinking disposition, and socialemotional adjustment to university life. Participants were 307 students who completed an online questionnaire. Latent class cluster analysis revealed three patterns of success: (1) average-achieving well-adjusted students (64%), (2) high-achieving average-adjusted students (14%), and (3) low-achieving low-adjusted students (22%). Follow-up ANCOVAs indicated that low-achieving low-adjusted students most strongly experienced that their social life hindered their study, whereas averageachieving high-adjusted students experienced the least interference from their study on their social life. These results indicated that student success is a multi-domain concept, with subgroups of first-year students showing specific patterns of success. The results of this study help to understand the feasibility of and tensions between domains of student success and provide suggestions for universities to adjust their support to specific student needs.

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Bullying is a problem in many schools around the world. It is seen as an unwanted phenomenon in education and in many contexts the reduction of bullying is a target of national and local education policy. In practice, the extent to which bullying occurs differs widely across classrooms. Part of these differences may be explained by teachers’ management of bullying. The goal of the present study was to combine two perspectives on teacher behavior to identify their impact on pupils’ bullying behavior at school, namely teachers’ bullying-specific and their general interpersonal behaviors. Data were collected by means of questionnaires from 33 upper-grade primary school teachers and their 784 pupils. Results of multilevel regression analyses showed that teachers’ bullying-specific and general interpersonal behaviors independently contributed to pupils’ bullying behavior. Lower levels of bullying were established when teachers were less likely to discipline the bully, and showed more interpersonal behaviors with high levels of control and closeness, and less interpersonal behaviors with low levels of control and closeness. These findings suggest that teachers’ bullying-specific and general interpersonal behaviors are two different pathways through which teachers can manage bullying. This underlines the need of taking teacher’s strengths into account in designing anti-bullying programs.

Although the importance of critical thinking skills for students when they enter university is widely endorsed, previous research has shown that incoming students show great variation in levels of critical thinking skills. The pre-university track of secondary education plays a major role in preparing students to think critically at university. The present study aims to investigate the way in which secondary education teachers think about and foster critical thinking skills to prepare their students for university. Semi-structured interviews with nine teachers showed that teachers do not have an unambiguous picture of critical thinking skills. Instead, teachers varied in their perceptions of the importance of critical thinking skills for university and in the practices they employ to foster these skills. It appears that teachers' perceptions and practices, firstly, depend on their images of university which are often based on their own study experiences, and secondly reflect the way they think about the cultivation of critical thinking skills and the transition to university. These results indicate that whether certain critical thinking skills are more or less encouraged in secondary education depends on the teacher.