At school entry, girls are rated by teachers as more competent on measures of social skills than boys. It is less clear if this higher rating is stable or grows over time. To address this question, multiple group curve of factors models investigated gender-specific growth trajectories across seven waves of measurement in a large, longitudinal…

An open classroom climate, one where diverse opinions and discussion of social and political issues are welcome, promotes civic development among youth and fosters critical consciousness. Critical consciousness, defined as the capacity to recognize societal inequity along with the motivation and action taken to challenge such inequity and promote…

Although assigned mentoring relationships have typically involved same-gender matches, a growing number of programs, particularly those in schools, have begun pairing female mentors with male mentees. This practice stems, in large part, from the relative dearth of male mentors and programs' efforts to increase the availability of youth mentoring…

Although research has examined how parenting may influence children's social information processing, little research has examined how these factors may influence children's social goals. The current study examined how both parent- and child-reports of parenting behaviors were associated with regressed change in children's reported social goals…

This article reports on analyses examining contextual influences on parenting with an ethnically and geographically diverse sample of parents (predominantly mothers) raising 387 children (49% ethnic minority; 51% male) in high-risk communities. Parents and children were followed longitudinally from first through tenth grades. Contextual influences…

This study examines the influence of contextual factors on parenting strategies among a sample of 104 Latina, European American, and African American mother-child pairs. The parenting constructs under investigation were selected as part of a collaborative research project among members of the parenting subgroup of the Study Group on Race, Culture,…

In an attempt to devise a methodology for characterizing children's intuitive theories of drug action, 217 children in Grades 1 to 6 were interviewed about how two substances, alcohol and cocaine, cause behavioral changes in their users. Measures tapped both structure (Piagetian complexity of causal reasoning, coherence, and construction of a…