Violence against teachers is a public health crisis that has devastating effects on school personnel well-being, health, and retention, as well as students’ educational outcomes. In collaboration with national organizations, the American Psychological Association Task Force on Violence against Educators conducted the first national survey on educator victimization that included 4,136 pre-K through 12th-grade teachers from all 50 U.S. states and Puerto Rico during the pandemic. In the current study, 43.7% of teachers reported experiencing at least one verbal threat, physical assault, and/or property damage, with verbal threats being the most prevalent form of victimization during the pandemic. Using a social–ecological framework and logistic regression analyses, characteristics of teachers, school climate, and school organizational and community factors were examined as predictors of teacher victimization (i.e., verbal threats, physical, property violence) during the pandemic. Findings revealed that teacher role (i.e., special educators), negative and positive dimensions of school climate, as well as school organizational and community factors (i.e., percent of students receiving free and reduced lunch, instructional modality, school level, and urbanicity) significantly predicted greater teacher victimization. While findings revealed that in-person instruction significantly predicted teacher violence across aggressors, teacher victimization was reported across instructional modality (in-person, hybrid, remote). Results offer insights into possible contextual antecedents to teacher victimization, sense of safety, and well-being in schools. Implications for research and school practice are presented.

Educators often use stories, humor, surprise, images, or other ploys to catch students' interest. This form of interest, often called "situational interest" because of how it is triggered by contextual cues, can facilitate learning to some degree. Yet it also may carry risks. This article proposes one such potential risk: flawed metacognition, in the form of inflated judgments of learning (JOLs) and overconfident estimates of future performance (calibration bias). Two experiments tested this hypothesis. In each, college students (Ns = 201, 196) read passages on a novel topic (the physics of lighEDU-2020-0310 tning in Study 1; the Hare Krishna organization in Study 2), crafted to be relatively dull or interesting. They then reported their interest, JOLs, and performance estimates before completing a test of their topic knowledge. Otherwise, their methods differed in several ways, such as how situational interest was induced and how performance was measured. Despite those differences, the findings from each study confirmed that situational interest inflated participants' JOLs and promoted overconfident performance estimates. Furthermore, Study 2 showed that those inaccurate metacognitive judgments affect studying decisions; due to their inflated JOLs, participants allocated less of their limited time for restudy to the fun passages. Potential moderators are considered, as are implications for interest theory, for metacognition theory, and for educators more generally. Educational Impact and Implications StatementEngaging students has long been a major priority for educators and students alike, compelling teachers to find ways to trigger and maintain students' "situational interest" through humor, animation, and other ploys. We explored a possible metacognitive risk to those ploys. In two experiments, we found that raising students' interest (relative to a control group) in novel topics made them overestimate how well they learned the topics and how well they could later answer questions on these topics. This overconfidence, in turn, convinced them to avoid studying the fun topics when considering which topics to revisit for additional study. The findings raise intriguing implications for educators about when and how best to trigger students' interest when learning.

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