Southeast Pennsylvania 4-H Extension educators identified a need for professional development in order to further develop current urban 4-H programs. The expectation was that increased awareness and knowledge would lead to increased skills competency in planning, implementing, and evaluating urban 4-H youth development programs. An interstate…

Little is known about how developmental experiences spanning early childhood through adolescence prepare children and youth to engage with society, and even less so for ethnically diverse Black children and youth. Building from work linking positive youth development (PYD) to civic engagement, this study examined how socialization trajectories…

What does it mean to be a Jewish girl today and how do Jewish adolescent girls navigate their identity? The study that I undertook is exploratory and designed to understand how three girls, who are recent day school graduates, experience the process of identity development as they begin high school. While the sample is small, the study reveals new…

The aim of this grounded theory study was to explore late-adolescents' process of sexual development along with their information- and support-seeking behaviors in a Swedish context. Data were collected in semi-structured interviews with late-adolescents aged between 18 and 21 years in high schools in central Sweden. The results showed that…

Achievement of a positive identity and its transition to adulthood is the most important task of the adolescent era. This cross-sectional explanatory mixed-method study sought to better understand barriers to identity development in female adolescents in Iran by explaining their own experiences and using a Positive Youth Development model as a…

Complexity is one of the major demands of adolescents' future life as adults. To investigate adolescents' competence development in applying problem-solving strategies in complex environments, we conducted a 2-wave longitudinal study in a sample of Finnish adolescents (11-17 years old; N = 1,959 at Time 1 and N = 1,690 at Time 2, 3 years later).…

In an interview, educator and psychologist Thomas Armstrong says that schools need to do a better job of speaking to--rather than resisting or crushing--adolescents' neurological development. "Essentially, the curriculum in high school needs to be more affective," he argues. "It needs to be more engaging in terms of humor, vitality,…

Hallways, cafeterias, buses, bathrooms, locker rooms, and other spaces in and around school property serve as venues for positive and negative social processes. Middle school educators can gain important insights into the adolescent world by exploring student perspectives of these spaces vital to middle school social experiences. Often unseen or…

Although Bowlby proposed that adolescence is a major developmental period to transfer their attachment figures from parents to other people, no comprehensive longitudinal study on attachment transfer from early to late adolescence exists. This study employed 215 early to late adolescents between ages 11 and 18 years (X-bar[subscript age] = 14.02,…

While parental involvement is often seen as a cornerstone in high school students' success, too much involvement can be problematic. Often teachers feel caught between supporting students' personal growth and parental expectations of students' academic achievement. Certain practices can be developed and implemented at a classroom and school level…

The purpose of this study was (1) to examine the impact that small ensemble free improvisation experiences had on dispositional empathy development when compared with other forms of collective music making; and (2) to examine the relationship between co-performing musicians' empathy levels and their performance achievement in small ensembles using…

This article explores the topic of adulthood within children's literature. Because adults author, illustrate, and produce children's literature, adults construct what childhood looks like, as well as the degree of diverse representation within children's texts. The varied, and sometimes conflicting, depictions of child characters reveal the…

Over the next two years, public education faces a critical moment created by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act requiring states and school districts to identify underperforming schools and create evidence-based plans to improve learning experiences and academic performance of all students. This report recommends key strategies for ensuring…

Participation in physical activity (PA) tends to decline between childhood and adolescence, and in Australia the bulk of this decline has been shown to occur in the domain of non-organised PA (e.g. active play, informal sports). A better understanding of the reasons for the decline in non-organised PA may support strategies to counter barriers and…

Female adolescent voice change (FAVC) is characterized by objectively measurable developments in both physiological and acoustical aspects of voice. Despite these observable changes, this period of vocal development has had little representation in both scientific and pedagogical research. Furthermore, few studies have articulated the perceptions…