Teaching critical thinking in community college classrooms involves helping students overcome emotional barriers and question and critique commonly held assumptions.

Prior research has shown that individuals living in the South express significantly less tolerant attitudes than the rest of the nation, while individuals residing in urban areas express significantly more tolerant attitudes than their rural peers. The authors seek to explain these generally unspecified Southern and urban effects by identifying…

Drawing on status attainment models, the authors examine the effects of family, peer, and school factors on expectations to graduate from a university for a sample of high school students in Bogota, Colombia, and La Paz, Bolivia. The expansion of higher education in these countries has followed different strategies. In Bolivia, the policy has been…

Meta-analysis was used to examine social, self-concept, and behavioral effects of peer-assisted learning (PAL) interventions with elementary school students. An electronic search of PsycINFO and ERIC databases resulted in 36 relevant PAL studies. Overall, effect sizes were small to moderate across the 3 outcome variable domains. Both social and…

We investigated bias in self-perceptions of competence (relative to parent ratings) for family, school, and peer domains as predictors of adjustment problems among 139 young adolescents over a 1-year period using a prospective design. Regressions examined measures of bias at Time 1 (T1) as predictors of ratings of internalizing and externalizing…

In 1997, the Santiago office of UNESCO implemented an assessment of student achievement in Latin America, working in collaboration with 13 Latin American ministries of education. Using a common sampling methodology and survey instruments, researchers in each country collected representative samples of data on third- and fourth-grade achievement in…

This paper presents an innovative method for qualitative research in education. The video dairy technique was developed and used alongside other qualitative methods to map the socio-cultural landscape of primary-school children's learning dispositions prior to their transfer to secondary school. The larger project comprised a case study of a group…

The goals of this study were to compare self-perceptions of self-efficacy, mood, effort, and hope between 123 adolescents with learning disabilities (LD) and a group of 123 Non-LD peers, who were matched for their level of academic performance and gender, and to explore the relations between measures of self-perception and achievement. The results…

Personally important autobiographical memories are the smallest unit of the life story, which begins to emerge in adolescence. This study examined 2 features of self-defining memories in late adolescence, the meaning made of the memories to garner an understanding of the narrative construction of identity as a life story and how those memories…

I passionately believe that reflective practice is an essential competency for the busy GP veterinary surgeon to develop throughout their career. Action learning sets would appear to offer a way of promoting this while at the same time helping the GP veterinary surgeon find a way forward with professional issues. In this article I reflect on my…

We investigated the direct and indirect pathways through which parental constructive behavior may influence the adolescent's affiliation with achievement-oriented peers. Using a longitudinal survey data set from nine California and Wisconsin high schools (from 9th through 12th grades, with an approximate age range from 14 through 18) structural…

The study of peer group status typically involves examination of peer nominations received. In this study, the focus was on nominations given and received. We examined the degree to which middle school students from different ethnic groups demonstrate same-ethnicity preferences in their peer nominations, the effects of the classroom ethnic…

Colleges can gain a better understanding of their students' progress by comparing themselves to peers. Using data from Achieving the Dream: Community College Count, this issue of "Data Notes" focuses on Achieving the Dream colleges that serve high percentages of Hispanic, black, and low-income students. This analysis reveals the noteworthy result…

In this paper we analyze the impact of classroom peers on individual student performance with a unique longitudinal data set covering all Florida public school students in grades 3-10 over a five-year period. Unlike many previous data sets used to study peer effects in education, our data set allow us to identify each member of a given student's…

Background: Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) have been neglected in health research. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to (1) describe the sexual risk behaviors of a sample of AAPI community college students using questions from the National College Health Risk Behavior Survey, and (2) to compare the sexual risk behaviors of AAPI…