Teacher practices as predictors of children's classroom social preference ☆ Amori Yee Mikami a, ⁎, Marissa Swaim Griggs a , Meg M. Reuland a , Anne Gregory b a University of Virginia, VA, United States b Rutgers University, NJ, United States article info abstract Article history: Received 21 June 2010 Received in revised form 6 August 2011 Accepted 9 August 2011 Students who do not get along with their peers are at elevated risk for academic disengagement and school failure. Research has predomi- nantly focused on factors within such children that contribute to their peer problems. This study considers whether teacher practices also predict social preference for children in that classroom. Participants were 26 elementary school teachers and 490 students in their classrooms followed for one school year. Results suggested that teachers who favored the most academically talented students in the fall had classrooms where children had lower average social preference in the spring after statistical control of children's fall social preference and externalizing behavior problems. Teachers who demonstrated emotionally supportive relationships with students in the fall had classrooms where children had greater possibility of changing their social preference from fall to spring. Although children with high externalizing behaviors tended to experience declining social preference over the course of the school year, teachers’ learner- centered practices attenuated this progression. However, teachers’ favoring of the most academically talented accentuated the negative relation between externalizing behaviors and social preference. Implications for school psychology practitioners are discussed. © 2011 Society for the Study of School Psychology. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Social preference Teacher practices Externalizing behaviors Peer rejection Teacher-student relationships Sociometric preference Journal of School Psychology 50 (2012) 95–111 ☆ This study was supported by the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to Amori Mikami. Portions of this data have been presented previously at the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness and Society for Research in Child Development. We thank the teachers and families who participated in this study, and Mike Coiner, Karen Marcus, and Daphne Keiser for their assistance with recruitment. We also appreciate the help of many undergraduate and graduate student research assistants in data collection and data entry. ⁎ Corresponding author at: University of British Columbia, at 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6T 1Z4. Tel.: + 1 604 822 2755. E-mail address: mikami@psych.ubc.ca (A.Y. Mikami). ACTION EDITOR: Sara Bolt. 0022-4405/$ – see front matter © 2011 Society for the Study of School Psychology. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jsp.2011.08.002 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of School Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ jschpsyc