Social gaming--online gameplay involving digital interactions with others--is a common form of social media use among adolescents. Research on this topic has neglected the social aspect of gaming and the potential role of social gaming in adolescent development. In this article, we define social gaming, drawing on interdisciplinary theories to…

"Middle School Today" is clustered into major themes: adolescent development and identity, the adolescent learner, curriculum and instruction, and the contemporary middle school. The book describes the components related to adolescent development starting with simple principles from psychology regarding the physical, cognitive, and…

A core attribute of the positive youth development movement has been to nullify negative perceptions of youth's capacities. Toward this end, measurement and classification systems benefit from efforts to view youth's capacities as assets contextualized by developmental potentials and opportunities. In this article, we consider this point with…

This paper seeks to explore how rural Latinx students' STEM identity development can be fostered by utilizing their cultural capital. By both a community cultural wealth and science identity model, this paper reviews previous literature to conceptualize how and why rural Latinx youth are continuously underrepresented within STEM education and…

Secondary schools are well placed to avert radicalization processes toward extremism because such trajectories often begin in adolescence. Adolescents are in the process of forming their identities, and most adolescents are idealistic, which makes them susceptible to groups that passionately pursue utopian visions. To avert the path toward…

Mentalizing--the ability to represent or infer the mental states of others--continues to develop into and throughout adolescence. Increased mentalizing sophistication during adolescence is thought to support the navigation of increasingly complex social relationships and contexts. However, developmental science has yet to aggregate the seemingly…

Adolescent literature often seeks to examine the emotional, psychological, and physical growth of adolescents. Psychologists, sociologists, and childhood studies experts have all claimed the importance of adolescence as a time of identity formation. Erik Erikson provides an apt term for this important phase in an individual's life: moratorium,…

In these last four decades or so, adolescence became understood as the time when young people ask fundamental questions about themselves, each other, the world, and one's past, present and future life that seek unity of purpose and coherence. For most young people the digital media are popular modalities through which they seek, consciously or…

Gifted adolescents may identify as "gamers" who create avatars to navigate video games and cell phone apps. Avatars provide a unique venue through which gifted teens can explore the issues of self and identity in a critical time of their development. The purpose of this article is to (a) provide an overview of what avatars are, (b)…

Early childhood has long been known to be a formative time in a child's development-- a time when the brain produces more than 1 million neural connections every second during the first few years of a child's life. However, there are factors at the individual and community levels that impact the development process. In communities across America,…

As American society has become increasingly aware of the plight of sex trafficked American children, attention has shifted from delinquency to victimhood (Mitchell, Finkelhor, & Wolak, 2010) with a corresponding awareness of the trauma that victims endure. This reconceptualization is incomplete without a larger understanding of the…

The second decade of life is a transition that poses unique developmental challenges for adolescents, and also for their families and teachers, and how well adolescents negotiate this transition will have important implications for later outcomes across the life course. Coming of age, acquiring the status and trappings of adulthood, unfolds over…

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (GLBTQ) youth have many strengths, with about 24% of boys and 48% of girls in seven metropolitan GLBTQ support groups identifying as gifted. Similarly, approximately 30% of 1,000 online GLBTQ adult respondents indicated that they, too, had attained gifted-range accomplishments. Parents of gifted…

This chapter discusses specifics of identity formation in Italian adolescents and emerging adults. We review consistent evidence illustrating that, in Italy, a progressive deferral of transition to adulthood strongly impacts youth identity development by stimulating identity exploration and postponement of identity commitments. We also consider…

In this column the author explores the middle school nexus of asynchronicity, Maslow's hierarchy of needs and bullying as they apply to gifted students in secondary schools, with an emphasis on the middle school student. The premise is typically referred to as "achievement vs. affiliation," (Ford, 2004; Neihart, 2006, 2008) and concerns the…