This report on the process of graduate and professional student socialization provides information that can be of use to graduate program faculty and administrators, professional associations, state legislatures, and professional licensing bodies charged with assuring clients that well qualified professional practitioners are being prepared in the…

This digest focuses on the evolution of beginning teacher induction programs over the past two decades, and discusses the reasons why such programs are essential to the professional development of teachers. An overview is presented of existing induction programs, and observed outcomes of these programs are briefly discussed. In considering what…

Gangs have become a fixture in the Mexican American populations of southern California and other regions, spreading from low-income neighborhoods in the Southwest to working class and lower-middle class suburban areas. The development and institutionalization of gangs have involved many factors, including racial discrimination and economic…

States that the concept of nongraded classrooms has flourished in educational circles since the days of the one-room schoolhouse, and that researchers have found that students in multiage classrooms form peer relationships that show more advanced socialization skills. Offers an annotated bibliography of 12 articles from the ERIC database on the…

Planned mentoring programs, which purposefully link disadvantaged youth with someone older and more experienced, have become a popular means of providing adolescents with adult contacts, counselors, and role models. Mentoring programs vary widely in their objectives, and in the duration, frequency, and intensity of the planned relationship. The…

A human ecological approach to the study of children's television viewing raises questions that researchers have largely neglected. Does television influence the interaction patterns of socializing agents with children and with one another? Are there long-term, psychological consequences of unintegrated and competing influences from television and…

Theories and models of adult development over the life span provide one of the foundational pieces for gaining a clearer understandings of learning in adulthood. Only recently have adult educators spoken more forcefully about the lack of integrated research on adult women. The purpose of this monograph is to describe those missing female voices as…

Research on the development of social competence in children is reviewed in this ERIC digest. The focus is on the social development of infants and toddlers which takes place in the family, in peer groups, and in preschool. The importance of infant bonding with at least one particular adult, socialization of the developming child within the family…

Described in this document are three stages in the emergence and acceptance in West Germany of the situation-oriented approach to education for "kindergarten" children (ages 3 to 6 years). In brief, this approach stresses learning in real-life situations within the community and values the contributions of children, families, and…

This paper focuses on the distinctive characteristics of urban environments, the ways these environmental features affect city children, and the roles that schools can play in modifying these effects. Bronfenbrenner's multilevel framework for studying the ecology of human development is described. Recognizing the central role that families play in…

This digest offers background information on home schooling and discusses conflicting viewpoints culled from research on the socialization of home-schooled children. The digest first notes the rapidly escalating numbers of children who are being home schooled in the 1990s and comments upon the professionalization of resources offered for parents…

In developing understanding of social roles, preschool children proceed from an initial awareness of single behavioral categories to the ability to comprehend, first, simple relationships between categories, and second, complex systems of categories. At each developmental level, children show characteristic modes of distortion when faced with…

Young children's natural processes of language acquisition, the ways they learn a second language, and guides for teaching children a second language are discussed. Topics addressed include social influences on language acquisition, code-switching in bilingual communities, and the relationship of enculturation and acculturation to the development…

Place-based education, which draws from local culture, history, and geography to create a meaningful curriculum, holds particular promise for rural homeschooling. Following a brief review of the homeschooling phenomenon, this digest identifies ways that rural place-based education can counter common concerns about homeschooling. In 1999 about 1.7…

This compilation of three papers investigates theoretical and practical facets of career development, focusing on cognitive theory and decision-making theory and their roles in the formation of computerized career development systems. In the first paper ("Cognitive-Behavioral Theory and Its Application to Career Development"), Gerald…