This paper looks at the phenomenon of upward mobility through education from a comparative and historical perspective. Pierre Bourdieu referred to upwardly mobile individuals in France as the miraculous ("les miraculés"), oblates ("oblats"), or, less often, defectors ("transfuges"). A difficulty with applying a theory…

Children start preschool with large individual differences in their early numerical abilities. Little is known about the importance of heterogeneous patterns that exist within these individual differences. A person-centered analytic approach might be helpful to unravel these patterns and the cognitive and environmental factors that are associated…

Across multiple schools and sites, the impact of grade-at-intervention was evaluated for children at risk or meeting criteria for reading disabilities. A multiple-component reading intervention with demonstrated efficacy was offered to small groups of children in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grade. In a quasi-experimental design, 172 children received the…

This study conducted comparative assessment of friendship in preschoolers with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HFASD, n = 29) versus preschoolers with typical development (n = 30), focusing on interactions with friends versus acquaintances. Groups were matched on SES, verbal/nonverbal MA, IQ, and CA. Multidimensional assessments…

This study investigated the complex influences of individual differences and school contexts on the growth of mathematical reasoning skills in high school, with particular emphasis on differences in academic preparation, demographics (i.e., race/ethnicity, gender and socioeconomic status), and school characteristics. Students' growth of…

Compared the sociocultural characteristics of pregnant adolescents (N=129) of low socioeconomic status with a nonpregnant adolescent group (N=100) from the same area of Santiago, Chile. Found several differences between the groups including less schooling, lower level of aspirations, and a tendency to live in "the present" among the…

Achievement gaps in standardized tests consist of the differences between test scores of students of color and those of white students and between scores of poor children and those of their wealthier peers. Maylone determines student testing behaviors, herein referred to as TestThink, which reflect differences in students' abilities to behave in…

Based on Bronfenbrenner's (1999) ecological perspective, a longitudinal, prospective model of individual differences in the quality of home environment (Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment--HOME) was tested in a sample of 179 Brazilian children and their families. Perinatal measures of family socioeconomic status (SES) and child…

Preschool children's responses to "wh-questions" (those including the concepts who, what, where, when, how, and why) were studied in order to determine the influence of socioeconomic status (SES) on frequency of correct and incorrect answers. Investigation focused on three questions: (1) When a response to a wh-question is incorrect,…

This paper was intended to promote a deeper understanding of a statistical method called balancing developed by National Assessment of Educational Progress. Problems in estimating main effects when populations are disproportionate, balancing solutions to these problems, methods equivalent to balancing, interpretation of balanced results, and some…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether there were significant differences in the academic achievement of children attending three different types of school: a model "open" school, a comparable "traditional" school, and a traditional school with a student population from a higher socioeconomic area. Data based on…

This research was designed to serve two major purposes: (1) to create a substantial library of theoretically neutral observational data as permanent documentation of actual life experiences in the lives of 3-year-old children from different socioeconomic backgrounds and (2) to analyze specimen records in order (a) to describe and quantify the…

The study was undertaken at the suggestion of the Commission on Religion in Appalachia, a private development agency in Central Appalachia. Given limited resources and the difficulty of obtaining firsthand knowledge of the circumstances in the area, the commission wanted to measure socioeconomic status in the 60 Central Appalachian counties to…

Intelligence tests are really only systems of classification of individuals with reference to others. Thus with such classification systems it is impossible to interpret a deficiency reflected by test scores in other than a socio-cultural frame of reference. Some 150 Black and White seventh grade children between the ages of 12 and 14 were…

The several statistical methods described for detecting test bias in terms of various internal features of a person's test performances and the test's construct validity can be applied to any groups in the population. But the evidence regarding groups other than U.S. blacks and whites is either lacking or is still too sketchy to permit any strong…