Gender and self-esteem provide lenses through which early and late adolescents construct their narratives of ideal and actual friendships. These narratives provide a unique window into the dynamics of adolescents' friendships during school transitions.

Citing the need for a basic, K-12 developmental framework for service learning, this article describes such a model. This model, an inclusive typology of service learning, distinguishes three levels of service learning: Community Service, Community Exploration, and Community Action. The authors correlate this typology to Piaget's cognitive…

To meet ordinary pre-school expectations, a child has to have acquired the ability to focus and attend to another person and to engage easily and warmly--exchanging simple, friendly gestures, smiles, head nods, emotional expressions, and meaningful sounds. He or she must be able to communicate, show another person what she wants and take the next…

In this article, the author discusses the assessment of children's year-end profiles. The key to creating a profile that will benefit parents as well as other teachers is to make sure it includes the most critical areas of development. It should also reveal the child's true range of functioning, including those areas in which he is strongest, even…

Understanding children's experience is increasingly a key purpose of much educational research. In contrast to traditional approaches to the study of children that emphasized the socialization of children through various stages of development, researchers within the social constructionism perspective begin with an insistence that childhood is a…

Applying Snyder and Feldman's 1984 consolidation-transition model to moral judgement development has enabled further understanding of how moral judgement translates to moral functioning. In this study, 178 college students were identified as being in consolidated versus transitional phases of moral judgement development using Rest's Defining…

The evaluation of developmental interventions has been hampered by a lack of practical, reliable, and objective developmental assessment systems. This article describes the construction of a domain-general computerized developmental assessment system for texts: the Lexical Abstraction Assessment System (LAAS). The LAAS provides assessments of the…

The aim of this study was to investigate the degree and content of negative meaning (i.e., negative evaluations, motivations, feelings) in four different age groups of men and women in East- and West-Germany. A sample was drawn from 290 cities in Germany which was stratified according to four age groups (18-25, 40-54, 55-69, and 70-85), gender and…

This article presents a discursive psychological approach in examining the ways that adolescent boys (ages 12-15 years) accomplish a sense of "maturity" by bringing off and managing certain features of "heterosexuality" in group interaction. We focus on and analyse moments when the boys negotiate implicit challenges, make evaluations and offer…

Background: Different developmental courses have been postulated for proactive and reactive aggression. Objective: Investigated the developmental course of proactive and reactive aggression in a large sample of adolescent boys from low socioeconomic areas. Method: A dual group-based joint trajectory method was used to identify distinct…

Investigation of children's knowledge of the Earth can reveal much about the origins, content and structure of scientific knowledge, and the processes of conceptual change and development. Vosniadou and Brewer (1992, claim that children construct coherent mental models of a flat, flattened, or hollow Earth based on a framework theory and intuitive…

Breakdown of oligodendrocyte-neuron interactions in white matter (WM), such as the loss of myelin, results in axonal dysfunction and hence a disruption of information processing between brain regions. The major feature of leukodystrophies is the lack of proper myelin formation during early development or the onset of myelin loss late in life.…

The authors examined the developmental course of self-regulation in a cohort of children from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The longitudinal sample included 646 children (48% girls; 52% boys; 36.2% Black, 23.4% Hispanic, 40.4% White) who were 4 to 5 years old in 1986 and who were followed up at ages 8 to 9 and ages 12 to 13. Levels of…

Developmental changes in children's verbal fluency were explored in this study. One hundred and forty children aged from 7 to 16 completed four verbal fluency tasks, each with a different the production criterion (letter, sound, semantic, and free). The age differences were analyzed both in terms of number of words produced, and clustering,…

A cross-sectional study examined the effect of meaning frequency, referred to as ''dominance'' in the semantic priming paradigm, where ambiguous words (primes) were processed in isolation. Participants made lexical decisions to target words that were associates of the more frequent (dominant) or less frequent (subordinate) meaning of a homograph…