Understanding peer bullying and broader school aggression from a school psychology perspective: a Social-Ecological Model based on extracurricular activities, instructional capacity, and learning contexts.

Background: Peer bullying is increasingly recognized as a contextual issue shaped by the school environment. Although extracurricular activities are often considered protective, their association with school-level aggressive and misconduct behaviors, including peer intimidation-related behaviors, appears to depend on broader institutional factors rather than operating in isolation. Objective: Grounded in a social-ecological framework, this study investigates the relationship between the availability of extracurricular activities and school-level aggressive and misconduct behaviors, specifically examining the mediating role of school-level instructional barriers and the moderating role of learning-related hindrances. Methods: Cross-sectional data from the PISA 2022 database were analyzed. After handling missing data, the final analytic sample comprised 16,555 schools across 75 countries. A moderated mediation model was tested to examine the association between the availability of extracurricular activities and school-level aggressive and misconduct behaviors, with problems hindering the school's instructional capacity as a mediator and phenomena hindering students' learning as a moderator of the direct association. Results: Greater availability of extracurricular activities was associated with lower levels of school-level aggressive and misconduct behaviors, indirectly through reduced problems that hindered the school's instructional capacity. In addition, the direct association between extracurricular activities and school-level aggressive and misconduct behaviors varied depending on the level of phenomena hindering students' learning. These findings indicate that the relationship between extracurricular activities and aggression- and misconduct-related school problems is shaped not only by institutional barriers but also by the broader school learning context. Conclusion: The findings suggest that extracurricular activities are not standalone protective factors but operate within a broader school ecology. Their protective potential is partly explained by instructional capacity and depends on the level of learning-related hindrances within the school environment, highlighting the need for comprehensive school-wide strategies addressing broader aggression- and misconduct-related school problems, including peer bullying-related behaviors.