This study seeks to examine the importance of sleep health in an Irish urban school context of high poverty. It adopts an action research approach to conduct small-scale research with a non-probability sample of twenty-four sixth class pupils, to ascertain whether a five-week school and home based intervention can improve; sleep behaviours among…

Studies indicate that children believe that positive behaviors are more likely than negative ones to remain stable across time and situations. The present study assessed whether children hold such optimism equally regarding their own vs. others' behavioral patterns. Thirty five-year-olds answered questions about the extent to which they viewed…

This article had four goals. First, the authors identified a set of general challenges and questions that a life-span theory of development should address. Second, they presented a comprehensive account of their Motivational Theory of Life-Span Development. They integrated the model of optimization in primary and secondary control and the…

Research supported in part by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant HD-03573.

The major focus of this study is on the relationship between anxiety and achievement. It was predicted that with young children, anxiety is likely to have a debilitating effect on their standardized test scores as well as on teachers' ratings of their competence. This hypothesis is generally supported. The sample consists of 156 childen from…

The principle thesis of this paper is that an understanding of the functions of fantasy activities is critical to an understanding of the influence of television and other media upon behavior. (Author)

This questionnaire contains measures of attitudes, motivation, behavior and knowledge associated with alcohol use and abuse. Although the Adolescent Alcohol Questionnaire was created for use with a specific education program, results suggest its utility in the evaluation of other education programs. (Author)

Childrens' understanding of motives for behavior was investigated by showing interpersonal situations on silent films to 6- to 14-year-old children from middle- and working-class backgrounds. (CM)

The purpose of this study was to test an informational vs. a dispositional hypothesis in predicting how children resolve instances of attributional conflict. Sixty-four sixth grade boys served as subjects after scoring in the upper and lower quartile of the Intellectual Achievement Responsibility Scale (IAR). Each child performed two separate…

Discusses many factors involved in determining the complex nature of a child's knowledge base. Includes three kinds of considerations: 1) task-oriented criteria; 2) motivational elements; and 3) the relationship between personality and performance. (Author/CS)

Considerable attention has been paid to the question of whether altruism increases with age through the years of childhood and early adolescence. The relationship between age and helping was examined for 128 boys and 128 girls in the first experiment. A second sample of an additional 256 participants was then studied to investigate factors which…

Although sports are a part of the child's everyday experience, little is known about factors that relate to children's participation in sports, to their perceptions of self-competence in sports, and to the impression by others of the competence. Children (N=110) participating in a Pediatric Sports Medicine Project completed the psychological…

Addressing the question, "What can be done to promote school achievement?", this paper summarizes the literature on motivation relating to classroom achievement and school effectiveness. Particular attention is given to how values, ideology, and various cultural patterns impinge on classroom performance and serve to enhance motivation to achieve.…

Some children exhibit a pattern of debilitating behavior characterized as helplessness. Within an achievement context, such children can be observed to initiate few constructive activities, to work with little intensity on those activities already attempted, and to persist at a task only moderately--especially following failure. A stratified…

Three experiments explored the conditions under which inductive inferences about people were made by children and adults. Results indicated that children often predicted that people would behave differently in the future than they did in the past. Younger children limited predictions of consistency to non-psychological events. Older children…