University life can be stressful and students may struggle to adjust socially. We examined students' social achievement goals--their orientations towards their relationships with their peers--as one important factor underlying students' social and psychological adjustment in college. When investigating the direct and indirect effects of social…

Navigating between cultures in addition to developmental changes and challenges in early adolescence can be difficult. We investigated school, family, and ethnic group as conditions for acculturation and school adjustment among early-adolescent boys and girls. Analyses were based on 860 mostly second- and third-generation immigrant students from…

Using two waves of longitudinal data, we utilized the family stress model of economic hardship to test whether family socioeconomic status is related to adolescent adjustment (substance use and academic achievement) through parental knowledge and adolescent self-regulation (behavioral self-control and delay discounting). Participants included 220…

Given recent concerns around boys' literacy, this study examined multidimensional writing motivation and engagement among boys. We explored internal and external validity of 11 adaptive (e.g. self-efficacy for writing) and maladaptive (e.g. disengagement from writing) factors of writing motivation and engagement. The sample comprised 781 male…

This study explored the contribution of outdoor orientation experiences to student thriving. Participants included 295 first-year college students from three institutions across North America. A thriving model was tested using structural equation modeling and included the following variables: outdoor orientation, thriving, involvement,…

It is well known that teachers frequently observe a decline in the scholastic motivation of many adolescent students, which in turn is often associated with a decline in students' individual school self-concept. In contrast, less is known about the association between students' individual school self-concept and school engagement, or the related…

On the basis of longitudinal data across 9 years, this study examined the contribution of sustained attention and executive function to the poor cognitive and socioemotional adjustment of school-age children whose mothers had depressive symptoms during the child's infancy. Mothers (N = 1,364) reported depressive symptoms across their child's…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether students' perceptions of their school environment and their adjustment to school are associated with health outcomes across gender and age groups. Design/methodology/approach: Data from the cross-sectional international Health Behavior in School-aged Children Survey of the year 2002…