Numerous studies show that students with special educational needs (SEN) in inclusive school classes are less socially included than their peers without SEN (Avramidis, 2013; Pijl et al., 2008). This is especially true for students with behavioral problems (Monchy et al., 2004). Based on social referencing theory, several studies in recent years already showed that the relationship quality between the teacher and a student is predictive for being accepted by peers (Farmer et al., 2011; Hendrickx et al., 2017). In this context, teachers’ relationships with individual students can be understood as a reference for the remaining students who to choose as future interaction partners. One way teachers provide information about their relationship with a specific student is through public feedback (Huber et al., 2018).

Conceptually, victimization and bullying can also be considered dimensions of social inclusion (Koster et al., 2009). Accordingly, studies found that students with behavioral problems are more likely to be victims of bullying by their peers (Jenkins et al., 2017). Furthermore, teachers and their relationships with students were shown to be linked to bullying and victimization in their classrooms (Dietrich & Cohen, 2021; Marengo et al., 2021), suggesting that social referencing processes might be present here as well. 

Based on these considerations, the teacher would represent a social reference in the classroom that promotes or inhibits bullying and victimization processes through their public feedback behavior. Accordingly, students who receive a lot of positive and little negative feedback from teachers would be less likely to be bullied by peers than classmates who receive little positive and a lot of negative public feedback.

Drawing on the findings on the importance of teacher feedback for the social inclusion of students, the aim of this study was to examine to what extent these findings can also be applied to bullying processes. Accordingly, we first investigated if behavioral problems are related to victimization by bullying. In a second step, we tested if this relationship is mediated by teacher feedback. 

The study is based on cross-sectional data on 849 students in 37 third and fourth-grade primary school classrooms. As social referencing processes are inherently subjective, we used peer ratings to measure positive and negative teacher feedback. Behavioral problems were assessed by teachers on a five-point Likert scale. Victimization by bullying was measured with the children's version of the Bullying and Victimization Questionnaire (BVF-K; von Marées & Petermann, 2010).

We found that behavioral problems were significantly related to self-reported victimization by bullying (β = 0.196, p < .001). To test the proposed mediation effect a multilevel path model was specified using Mplus. Results indicate that the association of behavioral problems and self-reported victimization by bullying is fully mediated by peer-perceived positive (indirect effect = 0.043; total effect = 0.050) and negative teacher feedback (indirect effect = 0.041; total effect = 0.048). These results suggest that students with behavioral problems are at a higher risk of being bullied by their peers. In this context, teacher feedback seems to be a crucial protective as well as risk factor mediating this relationship. Thus, this study sheds further light on the importance of teachers for peer ecologies in their classrooms and raises the question to what degree teacher feedback can be utilized to prevent bullying.

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