Tracking students into different classrooms according to their prior academic performance is controversial among both scholars and policymakers. If teachers find it easier to teach a homogeneous group of students, tracking could enhance school effectiveness and raise test scores of both low- and high-ability students. If students benefit from…

Prior research has found that proactive and reactive aggression differentially relate to many variables, including peer relations. However, no research has examined the relation between proactive and reactive aggression and peer delinquency, an important proximal predictor of adolescent antisocial behavior. The current study examined the…

Key psychosocial risks associated with adolescent smoking are well established. However, the ways in which the key risks of impulsivity, peer cigarette smoking, and self-reported use of alcohol interact to predict adolescent cigarette smoking is largely unknown. A sample of 210 Australian middle high school students aged 14-16 completed…

During adolescence, friendship affiliations and groups provide companionship and social and emotional support, and they afford opportunities for intimate self-disclosure and reflection. Friendships often promote positive psychosocial development, but some youth learn and adopt antisocial attitudes and deviant behaviors through their friendships.…

This study focused on the effects of peer moderation on meaningful interactions in online discussions. A meaningful interaction was defined as a message relating to a discussion topic, responding to a previous message, and adding substance to the discussion. A randomized-subject, posttest-only control group design was used to test the first…

School-wide, selective, and individual positive behavioral supports are critical elements of a comprehensive, tiered model of service delivery. Positive peer reporting (PPR) involves brief, highly structured sessions during which peers are provided the opportunity to praise the behavior of target students. PPR procedures were modified in this…

This study explored the use of social comparison appraisals in adolescents' lives with particular reference to enhancement appraisals which can be used to counter threats to the self. Social comparison theory has been increasingly used in quantitative research to understand the processes through which societal messages about appearance influence…

This study investigated the effects of the peer social context and child characteristics on the growth of authority-acceptance behavior problems across first, second, and third grades, using data from the normative sample of the Fast Track Project. Three hundred sixty-eight European American and African American boys and girls (51% male; 46%…

The historical examination of academic integrity in this monograph demonstrates that student academic conduct has always been strongly connected to faculty work, institutional structures, context, and organizational pressures. Student affairs professionals, faculty, and other campus constituents who have struggled with reducing academic misconduct…

The current research represents an initial step into the analysis of the effect of self-esteem, others' (peers and teachers) expectations and family support on academic achievement through learning approaches (deep processing, surface processing and effort). Data were gathered from 553 university students from different faculties of a Spanish…

Internationally, as well as here in the UK, the concept of "peer pressure" is widely used in analysing the factors influencing young people's experiences of sex and pregnancy--illustrated, for instance, by the following strapline from a recent English government-funded teenage pregnancy national media campaign: "Should I let my…

In the emerging tradition of language socialization research, this study examines the changing bilingual self-perceptions of three children, identical twin girls and their older brother, from early adolescence through early adulthood. The children were reared in a predominantly French-speaking home in south Louisiana by French/English bilingual…

This study examined the role of friends' attitudes in adolescent smoking (N = 203). Growth mixture modeling was used to identify three trajectories of smoking behavior from ages 12 to 14 years: a "low-rate" group, an "increasing-rate" group, and a "high-rate" group. Adolescents' own and their friends' attitudes at age…

Prior studies of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) suggest the existence of multiple NSSI typologies. Using data from 2,101 university students, this study employed latent class analysis to investigate NSSI typologies. Results show a good fitting 3-class solution with distinct quantitative and qualitative differences. Class 1 was composed largely of…

An assessment inventory (the Friend/Peer Support-Health Eating Physical Activity Scale-FPS-HEPAS) was developed to measure social influence patterns of college student physical activity and food consumption habits. Principal components analysis of 50 items with two referent sets (friends and peers) produced two scales with common factors:…