This study has important implications for microworlds such as Logo, HyperGami, and Newton's World, which use interaction to learn spatial mental models for science, math, geometry, etc. This study tested the hypothesis that interactively rotating (dragging) virtual shapes primes mental rotation. The independent variable was observation vs.…

This article explores how the association between sexual violence and substance use and mental health differs by race and life course stage. Analyses are based on data (n = 8,000) from the Violence and Threats of Violence against Women and Men in the United States Survey, 1994-1996 (NVAWS). Although sexual violence does not heighten the risk of…

This paper examines the contribution of peer relations to delinquency from the perspective of two sociological traditions: socialization/normative influence and opportunity. Earlier studies have likely overestimated normative influence by relying on respondents' reports about their friends' behaviors rather than obtaining independent assessments…

In this article, the authors discuss the reality of today's current students and their expectations of the institutions they attend. Specifically, they describe the current generation, the Net Generation, of traditional-age college students who have grown up with computers and the Internet, living in a rapid-response, multimedia, anytime-anywhere…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of personality factors in the value allotted by adolescents to various groups of goals. For this purpose, the "Cuestionario de Personalidad Situacional, CPS" (Situational Personality Questionnaire) and the "Cuestionario de Metas para Adolescentes, CMA" (Goals for…

To trace how age and language experience shape the discrimination of native and non-native phonetic contrasts, we compared 4-year-olds learning either English or French or both and simultaneous bilingual adults on their ability to discriminate the English /d-[delta]/ contrast. Findings show that the ability to discriminate the native English…

Early adolescents in the United States are increasingly exposed to a culture of worrisome messages. A degree of adolescent worry is normal, but the likelihood of a young person being anxious or depressed increases with the perceived number of worries. This study examined the effect of age, gender, and worry behavior on frequency of 8 adolescent…

Purpose: Low-income preschoolers' use of literate language features in oral narratives across three age groups (3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds) and two ethnic groups (Caucasian and African American) was examined. Method: Sixty-seven preschoolers generated a story using a wordless picture book. The literate language features examined were simple and…

English spelling is highly inconsistent in terms of simple sound-to-spelling correspondences but is more consistent when context is taken into account. For example, the choice between "ch" and "tch" is determined by the preceding vowel ("coach," "roach" vs. "catch," "hatch"). We investigated children's sensitivity to vowel context when spelling…

The current work investigated the effects of social influence on children's recall accuracy and metacognitive monitoring. Two studies were conducted in which 8-and 10-year-olds were confronted with postevent information in an interview situation. An interviewer (Study 1) or a confederate (Study 2) provided postevent information with two levels of…

The data presented in this article were obtained in a questionnaire survey of 2,893 students in the seventh, ninth, and eleventh grades of general education schools in Moscow. The survey was conducted by the Center of Sociology of Education of the Russian Academy of Education in 2002. Earlier publications by the same authors dealing with materials…

The effect of time-related mean differences on estimates of association in cross-sectional studies has not been widely recognized in developmental and aging research. Cross-sectional studies of samples varying in age have found moderate to high levels of shared age-related variance among diverse age-related measures. These findings may be…

Evidence on the relationship between income inequality and suicide is inconsistent. Data from the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for all fatal injuries was collected to conduct a multilevel case-control study. In multilevel models, suicide decedents (n = 374) were more likely than accident controls (n = 453) to reside in…

Although asthma deaths in children are rare, most asthma deaths should be preventable. No information has been identified in the professional literature addressing the occurrence of asthma deaths in schools. This investigation identified asthma deaths that occurred in US schools between 1990 and 2003 and the circumstances surrounding those deaths.…

A longitudinal study was used to examine age differences in the role of body mass index (BMI) and sociocultural pressures in predicting changes in body image and strategies to both lose weight and increase muscles among 443 children aged between 8 and 12 years (207 boys, 236 girls) over a 16-month period. The strongest predictors of body image and…