Background: About one third of youth in the United States are overweight or obese and African American youth are at an increased risk for pediatric overweight and obesity as well as their complications. Physical activity has been identified as one determinant of overweight and obesity, and school bullying has been found to be associated with…

African American and Hispanic students receive more punitive school discipline than White students even when students of color commit similar infractions as Whites. Similarly, students with a disability status are more likely to experience harsher discipline in schools compared to their counterparts without a disability label. This study examines…

African American female students' elevated suspension risk has received national attention. Despite a number of studies documenting racial/ethnic disparities in African American females' school suspension risk, few investigations have attempted to explain why these disparities occur. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of colorism in…

The literature on bullying among students with disabilities is burgeoning. The purpose of this study was to examine risk factors for adolescents' involvement in bullying across the bullying continuum. Drawing from the National Longitudinal Transition Study-2 (NLTS2), 2,870 adolescents with disabilities were sampled. Results from multinomial…

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate how school psychologists can proactively address disparities in school suspension through the examination of office discipline referrals (ODR). Results of two studies examining high school ODRs suggest that there is value in school psychologists disaggregating and analyzing ODRs at the school level and…

The achievement gap between African American and European American youth is a pervasive problem in the United States. This study explored how achievement values and behavioral engagement affect the academic attainment of an academically at-risk sample of 167 African American youth in late elementary school. Results indicate that achievement values…

There is a large body of research examining the discipline experiences of Black males (Lewis et al. in "Souls: A Critical Journey of Black Politics, Culture, and Society," 2009; Skiba et al. in "The Urban Review," 34, 317-348, 2002); however, less is known about the types of behavioral infractions Black female students exhibit…

The authors examined whether the adjustment patterns of socially and overtly aggressive preadolescent girls, ages 9 to 11 years, from rural communities differed by ethnicity. Students were administered a series of questionnaires to assess the degree to which girls engaged in various forms of aggression and to assess aggressive girls' social,…