Rate My Professor Peggy Kern

Professor Kern's research specializes in understanding, measuring, and promoting thriving and wellbeing across the lifespan, with applications in educational and workplace settings. She examines factors such as school belonging, social media language for personality and health insights, the PERMA framework for flourishing, and systems-informed approaches to positive psychology. She has authored or edited three books: Palgrave Handbook of Positive Education (2021, with M. L. Wehmeyer), Boosting School Belonging: Practical Strategies to Help Adolescents Feel Like They Belong at School (2019, with K. A. Allen), and School Belonging in Adolescents: Theory, Research and Practice (2017, with K. A. Allen). Her prolific publication record includes over 100 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, with highly influential works such as 'The PERMA-Profiler: A brief multidimensional measure of flourishing' (Butler & Kern, International Journal of Wellbeing, 2016), 'Personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: The open-vocabulary approach' (Schwartz et al., PLOS ONE, 2013), and 'What schools need to know about fostering school belonging: A meta-analysis' (Allen et al., Educational Psychology Review, 2018). These contributions have shaped wellbeing science, positive education, and personality assessment fields, evidenced by thousands of citations and widespread adoption of her developed measures. Professor Kern has delivered invited talks globally and collaborates on initiatives bridging research and practice in schools and organizations.