Executive functions (EFs) show promise as important mediators of adolescent academic performance. However, the expense of measuring EFs accurately has restricted most field-based research on them to smaller, non-longitudinal studies of homogeneous populations with specific diagnoses. We therefore monitored the development of 259 diverse, at-risk…

This longitudinal study of Mexican-American youth and emerging adults examines several ecodevelopmental factors longitudinally predicting high school and college graduation. Data from 1257 Mexican-American youth (including those born in Mexico and whose families are from Mexico) from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add…

Parental academic involvement is critical in promoting children's long-term academic success and may be especially impactful during middle school. However, longitudinal research is lacking for Mexican-origin youth and has focused mostly on mothers. Mexican-origin mothers and fathers reported their academic involvement during seventh grade, and we…

We examined 482,418 students who took the ACT in the seventh grade and again in high school, taking an exploratory analytic approach to examine academic growth trends from 1996 to 2017. Predictors included sociodemographics, interests, high school (HS) characteristics, HS coursework and GPA, and extracurriculars, which explained 25% of the…

The present study examined the role that adolescents' dyslexia plays in their educational expectations, as well as their parents' expectations concerning their offspring's future education. To investigate this, 170 adolescents were asked to report their educational expectations on two occasions while they were still attending…

The self-equilibrium hypothesis underlines the importance of having a strong core self, which is defined as a high and developmentally stable self-concept. This study tested this hypothesis in relation to body image (BI) trajectories in a sample of 1,006 adolescents (M[subscript age] = 12.6, including 541 males and 465 females) across a 4-year…

Social psychological interventions in schools have gained popularity in education research for their ability to often dramatically increase student academic performance through simple exercises. Many of these interventions are designed to address stereotype threat, which is defined as "being at risk of confirming, as self-characteristic, a…

This study investigated the contributions of child and parents' sociodemographics, daily stressors, family environment, and coping strategies, to academic achievement, cognitive functioning and aggression in a sample of 600 children at the intermediate grade levels from Gaza Strip. Each of the predictor variables exhibited a different pattern of…

An investigation of the relationship between background knowledge and reading comprehension performance on standardized reading tests (the California STAR Test) was conducted with sixth, seventh, and eighth-grade ethnic minority children from low-income backgrounds (N = 68). Predictor variables examined included perceived background knowledge…

Studies of student risk of school dropout have shown that present predictors of at-risk status do not accurately identify a large percentage of students who eventually drop out. Through the analysis of the entire Grade 1-12 longitudinal cohort-based grading histories of the class of 2006 for two school districts in the United States, the author…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between the perceptions of school membership, risk factors, and school outcomes among a sample of alternative school students. The study subjects were 48 7th-9th graders who were at high risk for school failure because of their serious and chronic behavioral and academic problems. All…

The present study advances understanding of (a) the development of achievement goals, (b) the changing association of achievement goals and achievement over time, and (c) the implications of changes in achievement goals for changes in achievement over time. African American and European American adolescents' (N = 588) achievement goals and…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors that predict academic achievement and school attachment among Hispanic seventh- and eighth-grade adolescents and to determine whether the associations between these factors are similar for Hispanic and white adolescents. The sample consisted of 170 adolescents. Results for Hispanic…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among students' self-perception, attitudes toward school, study and organizational skills, achievement motivation, attributional style, gender, parental involvement and style, parental income and parental level of education, and students' academic performance or achievement. Using…

This study extends previous research on the social psychological implications of pubertal timing to education by applying a life course framework to data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and from the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study. Early pubertal timing, which has previously been associated with major…