The results of a case study in an elementary school indicate that parents can effectively support school improvement efforts even in schools with characteristics identified in previous research as inimical to change. Administrators, teachers, and parents were interviewed about the impact of a five-part plan developed by the school's parent teacher…

When in childhood concepts about alcohol and drinking begin to develop has just begun to be investigated. A study was conducted to examine cognitive, maturational, and differential exposure influences on the acquisition of concepts about alcoholic beverages in preschool children. Knowledge about alcoholic beverages and drinking was assessed in 65…

An account by a mother--who was also a children's librarian--of how she explored her young daughter's responses to books, this book describes the effect of books upon the development of children in their early years. Beginning shortly after the child's second birthday, the book relates the mother's and daughter's views about the picture books they…

Strategies to involve parents in the schooling of their children, especially parents of economically or educationally disadvantaged youngsters, are generally either advisory or collaborative. Advisory strategies structure parental involvement through councils at the school or district level. Collaborative strategies pursue various methods for…

This paper reports preliminary findings of a 3-year study examining the ability of qualitative and quantitative measures of the home environment variables (HEV's) to contribute to the prediction of third- through fifth-grade students' achievement and growth scores in reading and mathematics. Data were obtained for 198 parent/student pairs from…

The purpose of the present longitudinal study was to determine how well a broad, comprehensive battery of tests administered in kindergarten predicts reading achievement in elementary school grades 1 through 6. The test variables were reduced to six predictive factors by factor analysis, and these, together with the variables, Child's Sex and…

The hypothesis that children are placed at increased risk for adjustment problems when parents divorce and remarry was tested with a sample of 206 boys in the fourth grade. It was also hypothesized that the relation of parenting transitions and boys' adjustment would be mediated by family management practices. Subjects attended schools in…

A study determining whether parents' possession of a college degree influenced the adult attainments of their progeny is presented. Techniques of path analysis were utilized to investigate both the direct and indirect effects of parents' college graduation on children's income, educational attainment, and occupational status. Separate estimations…

Parents of children in elementary and secondary school foreign language programs want to know what outcomes they can expect from the programs and how they can support and encourage their children's language study. Learning outcomes vary with program goals. Program types include immersion, partial immersion, foreign language in elementary schools…

Recent rapid changes in the expectations for women make a literal imitation of one's mother's life increasingly less likely to occur. To explore the process by which the experience of observing their mother's lives becomes a source of their own choices in young adulthood, female junior and senior college students (N=114) responded to an…

To investigate dimensions of fathers' participation in family work and to examine the effects of each dimension on children's sex-role related attitudes, this study collected data from 160 fathers of kindergarten and fourth-grade children, their wives, and their children. Fathers and mothers were interviewed jointly as well as separately and they…

To provide a context for a discussion of parental modernity and child development, this paper explores concepts of societal and individual modernity and examines historical evidence of increasing levels of intellectual competence and an active orientation in the conduct of life. Specific attention is given to sociological theories of Bell (1973)…

The BRONCOS reading improvement project is a Right to Read program operating in six Rhode Island schools (five public, one parochial), designed to improve the communication skills of 1,554 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. The program was designed to accomplish a greater degree of individualized instruction. Existing reading programs…

Part II of a 3-part report. See also AA 501 768, AA 501 770, AA 501 771, and AA 501 772.

Recent research about children's early personal-social learning and development is reviewed in relation to three basic psychological questions. The first concerns extent of stability or consistency in stylistic patterns of personal-social behavior across infancy, the preschool years, and the early school years. The second concerns current…