Beginning in 2021, this project is based in the Department of Special Needs Education, Oslo University.

Principal Investigator: Geir Nyborg, University of Oslo. Investigators: Liv Heidi Mjelve, University of Oslo; Anne Edwards, Oxford University; W. Ray Crozier, Cardiff University; Robert J Coplan, Carleton University: Gunnar Bjørnebekk, The Norwegian Center for Child Behavioral Development, Oslo.

This project aims to identify the processes that contribute to shy students’ successful engagement as learners, as well as risk and protective factors that may impact on this success. In the first stage, interviews are conducted with individual middle-school students with the aim of tapping directly into their perspectives and allowing the researchers to hear the shy students in their own words. We draw upon the Vygotskian cultural-historical concept of “social situation of development”, “the path along which the social becomes the individual”. In the second phase, we aim to conduct a large-scale quantitative study to evaluate a theoretical model linking student shyness to measures of  school adjustment.