Mitigating the perils of transition to early adolescence, while also supporting the promise of this stage of human development, has been a major focus of middle school reform (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1989; Jackson & Davis, 2000). As a result, there are many classroom-based educational programs that target the social and…

Social responsibility can be defined as a set of prosocial values representing personal commitments to contribute to community and society. Little is known about developmental change--and predictors of that change--in social responsibility during adolescence. The present study used an accelerated longitudinal research design to investigate the…

How can an understanding of adolescent development inform strategies and practices for supporting first-generation college goers? In "Ready, Willing, and Able," Mandy Savitz-Romer and Suzanne Bouffard focus on the developmental tasks and competencies that young people need to develop in order to plan for and succeed in higher education. These…

In this article, the author draws on a study of an after-school initiative serving inner-city high school students to describe and reflect on ways in which apprenticeship-like experiences support work on a variety of developmental tasks. The author describes key dimensions of the apprenticeship experience, discusses challenges faced by…

Career preparation represents a major developmental task of adolescence, which has not received sufficient attention in empirical research on career development. Thus, this study was designed to examine the structure, continuity, and change in adolescent career preparation and its relationships with adjustment. The data were collected from a…