This study examined the relation between witnessing violence and drug use initiation among 6th graders attending middle schools in 5 rural counties and investigated the extent to which family support and parental monitoring moderated this relation. Data were obtained from 1,282 adolescents at 2 time points during the 6th grade. Witnessing violence…

While the achievement gap between African American students and white and Asian students is discussed widely in the media (e.g. Schemo, 2003), the gap in discipline between African Americans and these groups has gained much less attention. Few studies have explored teacher processes that affect the over-representation of African American students…

Objective: To estimate the applicability of an extended version of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) in predicting self-perceived sugar intake among adolescents in Uganda. Method: Two questionnaires were completed involving 1146 and 372 secondary school adolescents. Confirmatory factor and path analyses were performed using Amos software.…

Professional wrestling has become an internationally popular type of "sport entertainment" among youth. The professional wrestling industry targets children as consumers for live events, televised programming and product merchandising. However, the nature of wrestling has changed in the last two decades and many educators are unaware of…

This study involved perceptions of bullying in six Year 7 children attending a speech and language base part-time and the perceptions of their mainstream peers without speech and language problems. Base-taught children and mainstreamed peers completed a bullying questionnaire and a social inclusion survey. Base-taught children with language…

This study reports on findings from the first two years of a study to compare a standard Life Skill Training (LST) program with an infused (I-LST) approach. Nine small, rural school districts were randomly assigned to LST, I-LST, or control conditions in grade seven. The LST program significantly reduced alcohol use, binge drinking, marijuana use,…

Background: Some previous studies have linked Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) with a bias in spatial awareness away from the left. As genetic research suggests that ADHD may be better viewed as an extreme on a continuum rather than a distinct entity, here we examined this issue in boys from the normal population. Method: From an…

For school officials in West Des Moines, Iowa, it was a disturbing discovery: A teenager convicted of molesting a 13-year-old girl was enrolled in one of their junior high schools. It was a situation that gave local officials reason to pause. They knew all about conducting criminal background checks on new employees, and they had heard that some…

Music educators want to encourage every child to sing or play an instrument--or at least they want them to feel capable of successful singing and playing. But recently, those of them concerned with performing arts medicine and musicians' injuries have had to deal with the sobering truth that just being able to sing or play an instrument is not…

The authors observe that students in school who exhibit challenging behaviours are given labels such as "severe behaviour," "troubled," or "violent" and that these negative labels have repercussions on students. School administrators also employ zero tolerance policies without addressing the root causes of negative…

The concept of school engagement has attracted increasing attention as representing a possible antidote to declining academic motivation and achievement. Engagement is presumed to be malleable, responsive to contextual features, and amenable to environmental change. Researchers describe behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement and recommend…

This study examines the out-of-class learning activities undertaken, at the students' volition, by groups of students. Data were gathered through 57 individual and 15 focus group interviews with university students in Hong Kong. Group activities reported included: copying, sharing material, consulting peers, consulting teachers, studying and…

The purpose of this work is to identify process measures of student interaction with a course management system (CMS). Logs maintained by Web servers capture aggregate user interactions with a Website. When combined with a login system and context from the course recorded in the CMS, more detailed measures of individual student interaction can be…

Disruptive behavior may be associated with poor academic achievement due to covariance with attention problems and low IQ. Evidence is based on clinical samples and on associations between problem behaviors in young children and later achievement difficulties. The contemporaneous relations and their genetic and environmental influences have not…

Behaviour disorders represent a major concern in today's schools. One widely used method to address these problems has been social skills training. To date, the efficiency of this training is modest with respect to the transfer, maintenance and generalization of the newly learned skills. The goal of this study is to compare the profiles of…