Attendance in preschool centers can yield short-term benefits for children from poor or middle-class families. Yet debate persists in Europe and the United States over whether centers yield gains of sufficient magnitude to sustain children's cognitive or social advantages as they move through primary school. We report on child care and home…

"Lumina Foundation Lessons" is an occasional publication in which the foundation shares the results of its grantees' work on strategies to improve the persistence rates among Indiana's underserved college freshman and sophomore populations. This issue, the first in the series, contains the following articles: (1) Summer Transition…

This study examined the effects of self-regulated learning (SRL) and epistemological beliefs (EB) on individual learner levels of academic achievement in Web-based learning environments while holding constant the effect of computer self-efficacy, reason for taking an online course, prior college academic achievement, and parental level of…

Approximately 3 million teens are diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease (STD) annually; STDs rates for American Indian young adults are among the highest of any racial/ethnic group. An important risk factor for STDs is early initiation of sex. In this study, we examined risk for early initiation with 474 American Indian youth ages 14-18,…

Pedophilia is the experience of recurrent intense sexual urges and sexually arousing fantasies involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child by a person (at least 16 years of age and 5 years older than the victim) who has acted on these urges. This research paper reviews research on the effects of parent-child relationships and home…

This book is an attempt to situate Canadian child-rearing advice in its historical and social context in 21st century and the origins and changes in this advice. The volume addresses the untold story of the experience of mothering that largely has been omitted from traditional accounts of history. This account of education for motherhood begins in…

This study examined the impact of conversations with mothers and peers on adolescents' beliefs about gender roles, their career plans, and their plans for managing work and family responsibilities. Approximately 1,000 twelfth grade students, evenly divided by gender, were interviewed. Results concerning children's beliefs about gender roles…

This paper discusses the findings of a United Kingdom study that examined the impact of the 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA) on a group of parents whose children would be most affected by the changes. Between the fall of 1989 and the summer of 1992, five rounds of interviews were conducted with the same sample of 138 parents from 11 different…

Recognizing the critical role of parent involvement for the success of their children in school, this report presents statistics which focus on various areas in which parents and schools can work together to develop partnerships. The report presents data collected from a survey of 810 public elementary schools serving kindergarten through grade 8.…

Intended for fourth- to sixth-grade students and their parents, this book provides information needed to complete language arts assignments. The book was compiled with the help of a service called Dial-A-Teacher, a collaborative program of the United Federation of Teachers and the New York City Board of Education, which operates a telephone…

This paper presents findings of a study that examined the effect of British parents' social class on their ability to intervene in their children's schooling and to participate as "active consumers." In this case study of one school in England, data were derived from a questionnaire mailed to 491 parents of pupils in years 7, 9, and 11;…

When parents develop negative attitudes towards new practices, powerful resistance may develop and new instructional practices may disappear. This paper examines: (1) how parental attitudes towards new classroom instructional practices influence the introduction and continuation of these practices in a school; (2) the impact of the widening gap…

Early cognitive theorists have emphasized the link between what people say to themselves and how they feel and behave. This study investigates the relationships between self-talk (what people say to themselves with particular emphasis on the words used to express thoughts and beliefs about oneself and the world to oneself) and significant others'…

The acculturation of developmental timetables for autonomy from parental supervision and in social relationships was studied in a sample of 220 ethnic German immigrants to Germany from Romania, Poland, and countries of the former Soviet Union. The acculturation rate was predicted to be related to prior differences in parent-adolescent interaction…

With increasing numbers of mothers entering the workforce, interest has focused on which elements and conditions of maternal employment have predictable effects on children. This investigation assessed the relationship of maternal employment factors and selected maternal attributes (career salience, maternal role investment, and maternal…