How do you take the passion and chatter that K-5 students bring to the classroom and turn it into conversation skills that make them better learners? Academic conversation can help hone speaking and listening, critical thinking, and social-emotional skills, as well as deepen content knowledge. But despite its effectiveness, this kind of…

Suicide continues to be a considerable health risk among adolescents and is the second leading cause of death among adolescents between the ages of 10 and 24. Middle school-aged adolescents may be at a heightened risk for suicide, as middle school can be rife with intrapersonal and interpersonal stressors. One such stressor may be sexual activity…

Middle school brings rapid developmental changes for adolescents, and parent engagement is as essential as ever. However, what worked for parent-teacher partnerships in elementary school doesn't fit so well in middle school. Adolescents are building their autonomy, and teachers must help empower parents' efforts to bolster students as independent…

Are there developmental pathways for learning that provide continuity from early learning through adulthood with measurable intervals for assessment and with transitions for learning that are understandable, stable, identifiable, communicable, flexible, and affordable to implement? If so, what are the foundations for learning that enable students…

From his first attempts to explain attachment phenomena in the 1940s through his "Attachment and Loss" trilogy (Bowlby, 1969/1982, 1973, 1980), John Bowlby reformulated the theoretical underpinnings of attachment theory several times. He initially attempted to explain attachment phenomena in psychoanalytic terms. Then he invoked…

Background: Enacting good science in pursuing the international study of positive youth development (PYD) requires using sound developmental theory to formulate questions that are tested through employing rigorous, change-sensitive measures, designs, and data analyses that are aimed at describing, explaining, or optimizing thriving among the…

The purpose of this qualitative, phenomenological study was to investigate the experiences and perspectives of parents of highly and profoundly gifted children in developmental and cultural contexts. A purposive sample was selected from parents who are members of networks and organizations serving highly and profoundly gifted students. We…

Background: Although research clearly demonstrates the importance of motivation in mathematics learning, relatively little is known about the developmental dynamics between different facets of mathematics motivation and performance, especially in the early years of schooling. Aims: In a longitudinal setting, we examined (1) how children's ability…

This article presents the adaptation of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI; Fenson et al., 1993, "Guide and technical manual for the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories." San Diego, CA: Singular Press; Fenson et al. 1994, Variability in early communicative development. "Monographs of the Society for…

Abstract How do people gather samples of evidence to learn about the world? Adults often prefer to sample evidence from diverse sources--for example, choosing to test a robin and a turkey to find out if something is true of birds in general. Children below age 9, however, often do not consider sample diversity, instead treating non-diverse samples…

Purpose: This study compared and characterized the tense and agreement productivity of boys with fragile X syndrome (FXS), children with developmental language disorder (DLD), and children with typical development (TD) matched on mean length of utterance. Method: Twenty-two boys with FXS (M[subscript age] = 12.22 years), 19 children with DLD…

Play is widely acknowledged as being critical for children's development, yet opportunities for play are becoming more scarce for many children.

Trajectories of stability and change in bullying roles were examined through a longitudinal prospective study of 916 school students followed up biannually from age 11 to 17. Perpetrators and victims had relatively stable trajectories with most of the children remaining in the same role over time or becoming uninvolved. Bully/victim was the most…

Purpose: The transition to school and the first years of elementary school education are very sensitive phases for reading development. Reading researchers have established key precursors and developmental steps in these phases. However, how these components interact and affect growth is not well understood yet. The current study from Germany…

By approximately 6 years of age, children can use time-based visual selection to ignore stationary stimuli, already in the visual field and prioritize the selection of newly arriving stimuli. This ability can be studied using preview search, a version of the visual search paradigm with an added temporal component, in which one set of distractors…