We combine phone-survey data from 2,200 students collected in July-August of 2020 with student-level administrative data from 54 schools in four northwestern provinces of Cambodia to investigate the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for grade 9 students. These students were particularly vulnerable to dropping out of school prematurely due to…

Attention deficit/hyperactivity behaviors in children are often unnoticed until they reach school age; however, evidence suggests that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) tends to develop at an earlier age. Recent studies also indicate that perinatal maternal mental health is associated with ADHD symptoms in offspring. This study…

Purpose: We aim to identify the most accurate model for predicting adolescent (Grade 9) reading difficulties (RD) in reading fluency and reading comprehension using 17 kindergarten-age variables. Three models (neural networks, linear, and mixture) were compared based on their accuracy in predicting RD. We also examined whether the same or a…

Research has shown that the development of cognitive and social skills in preschool predicts school readiness in kindergarten. However, most longitudinal studies are short-term, tracking children's development only through the early elementary school years. This study aims to investigate the long-term impact of preschool predictors, intelligence,…

The current study examines the extent to which associations between internalizing problems, body mass index (BMI), and language skills from early (36 months) to late childhood (fifth grade) are due to relatively stable between-child differences, time-specific correlations, or cross-lagged paths. Data from the NICHD study, Early Child Care and…

Lebanon has been participating in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study assessment (TIMSS) since 2003, however, data indicate a continuous decline in performance of Grade 8 students. The purpose of this study is to examine the factors critical to the achievement of Lebanese Grade 8 students and investigate the reasons for their…

This paper discusses the contributions of variables commonly used within the status attainment and blocked opportunities models in addition to school context variables in predicting pupils' aspirations for higher education prior to the transition to differentiated upper secondary education in Croatia (14-15 years). The findings, arising from a…

Guided by the life course perspective, this study investigated the developmental antecedents of contact, closeness/warmth, and negativity in young adults' relationships with their parents. Taking the developmental systems approach, we considered interindividual differences in not only initial levels of parenting quality in early adolescence (Grade…

This study examined adolescent and maternal factors of the quality of maternal homework involvement and the extent to which the factors predicted adolescents' subsequent achievement through adolescents' and mothers' perceptions of the quality of maternal homework involvement. The sample consisted of 847 Finnish adolescents and their 662 mothers…

Writing is a complex task that requires the activation and coordination of several processes. In addition to the research on the domain-specific factors that contribute to school achievement, there is an increasing interest on general variables, such as mindfulness. Here, we aimed to test the contribution of middle-grade students' trait…

Background: Most previous studies of teaching styles and reading skills have been cross-sectional. Longitudinal research is needed to clarify the direction of effects. The present longitudinal study examined the degree to which differences in teaching styles in the third grade predict the sixth-grade reading performance. The consistency of the…

This study investigates the impact of early adolescent internalizing symptoms on family functioning for girls and boys, as moderated by perceived stress. Surveys were administered to 1,344 middle school students (11-14 years; 51% girls; 51% non-Hispanic White) in the fall of 2016 (T1) and 6 months later in the spring of 2017 (T2). For boys,…

To better understand the longitudinal relations between risk and relationship variables during early to middle adolescence, we employed latent variable cross-lagged panel models using data (N = 1,050) from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study. Results showed self-reported individual risk behavior ([beta] = 0.77-0.88)…

Children's motivation to master challenging tasks is an important predictor of school success, and yet, such motivation declines during adolescence. It is therefore important to identify ways to intervene to reduce this decline. One malleable factor that is associated with motivation is parenting. The present study used structural equation…

The present study used a genetically informed design of twins raised in the same family (375 monozygotic and 290 dizygotic twins; 50.2% girls) to examine the association between adolescents' genetic risk for depressive symptoms and the course of the parent-child relationship quality throughout adolescence. Depressive symptoms and the quality of…