The authors draw on two families of theories--developmental networks and sociocultural perspectives on learning--to develop an interdisciplinary approach to the study of doctoral education as a path to the professoriate. This approach seeks to elucidate the connection between doctoral students' developmental networks, what they learn during their…

This study examined the prevalence, degree of association and differential effect, by sex and age, of conduct disorder symptoms on psychopathology and functioning. Participants included 680 Spanish children and adolescents between 8 and 17 years and their parents, attending to psychiatric outpatient consultation. Data were obtained through…

The current experiment examined the use of plausibility judgments by children to reject distractors presented on "yes/no" recognition memory tests. Participants studied two lists of word pairs that shared either a categorical or rhyme association, which constituted the global nature of the two study conditions. During the recognition memory tests,…

Background: Most psychosocial risk factors appear to have general rather than specific patterns of association with common childhood and adolescence disorders. However, previous research has typically failed to 1) control for comorbidity among disorders, 2) include a wide range of risk factors, and 3) examine sex by developmental stage effects on…

Stability and change of moral disengagement were examined in a sample of 366 adolescents from ages 14 to 20 years. Four developmental trajectories were identified: (a) nondisengaged group that started with initially low levels followed by an important decline, (b) normative group that started with initially moderate levels followed by a decline,…

The present studies investigated children's and adults' intuitive beliefs about the physical nature of essences. Adults and children (ranging in age from 6 to 10 years old) were asked to reason about 2 different ways of determining an unknown object's category: taking a tiny internal sample from any part of the object (distributed view of essence)…

The counseling profession prides itself on its developmental focus. However, counselors, counselor educators, and supervisors have generally applied only "phasic," and not "stage," theories to counseling and supervision practice and have not incorporated developmental concepts into their teaching. This article continues the effort of rectifying…

The author reflects on Piaget's 1972 article, "Intellectual evolution from adolescence to adulthood," addressed to questions regarding what he alleged to be the final, most advanced level of cognition in his developmental stage theory--formal operations, as described in his 1958 volume coauthored with Inhelder, "The growth of logical thinking from…

The development of an equally beneficial and efficient teaching and learning system implies the application of multiple educational theories and methods. One method that had become prominent throughout the years is ability tracking. Based on this method, elementary and middle-school students are grouped into levels that are designated to…

Past research in both the transitions to adulthood literature and cultural sociology more broadly suggests that the working class relies on traditional cultural models in their construction of identity. In the contemporary post-industrial world, however, traditional life pathways are now much less available to working-class men and women. I draw…

Loss of previously established behaviors in early childhood constitutes a markedly atypical developmental trajectory. It is found almost uniquely in autism and its cause is currently unknown (Baird et al., 2008). We present an artificial neural network model of developmental regression, exploring the hypothesis that regression is caused by…

In a 15-year longitudinal study, a retrospective quasipanel design was chosen to detect developmental patterns related to the students' (N = 78) self-ratings. In 1999 (grade 9), the students who were rated as part of the risk group (n = 22) by using their kindergarten teachers' initial socio-emotional behaviour ratings that were done in 1989, were…

The predictive relations between social capital depth (high-quality relationships across contexts) and breadth (friendship network extensivity) and early-adult life adjustment outcomes were examined using data from a prospective longitudinal study. Interviews at age 22 yielded (a) psychometrically sound indexes of relationship quality with…

Three studies compared beliefs about natural and late blooming positive traits with those acquired through personal effort, extrinsic rewards or medicine. Young children (5-6 years), older children (8-13 years), and adults all showed a strong bias for natural and late blooming traits over acquired traits. All age groups, except 8- to 10-year-olds,…

The six chapters in this research involve the history and development of middle schools from the early conceptions of junior high school to the ground breaking research by the Carnegie Foundation on changes in how young adolescent students develop, are taught and transitioned from elementary levels to high school. Professional literature reporting…