This study investigated the role of cognitive and language skills as predictors of early literacy skills in children with Specific Language Impairment. A range of cognitive and linguistic skills were assessed in a sample of 137 eight-year-old children with SLI at the beginning of the school year, and 6 months later on word decoding and reading…

Toward advancing conceptualizations of the spillover hypothesis, this study examined the conditions and mechanisms underlying the transmission of distress from the interparental relationship to parenting difficulties over a 2-year period in a sample of 233 mothers (M = 35.0 years) and fathers (M = 36.8 years) of kindergarten children. Findings…

This study investigated the convergent and discriminant validity of the high-stakes Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) in both reading and writing at grade levels 4, 8, and 10. The data from the 2006 FCAT administration were analyzed via traditional multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) analysis to identify the factor structure and structural…

Given the importance of student engagement for healthy outcomes, research needs to investigate whether school-based assets promote student engagement beyond individual and family influences. Unfortunately, such research has been limited by a lack of valid instrumentation. After examining the psychometrics of the California Healthy Kids Survey…

Researchers have long been interested in understanding factors affecting student achievement. To contribute new insights to the literature, this study investigated grade-level differences in the relationships of students' perceived academic support (from parents, teachers and peers) to academic achievement directly and also indirectly through…

This article examines students from ethnic minorities and majorities with regard to the relationships between their social and academic integration and their quality of learning. A total of 523 students at four universities completed a questionnaire: analyses of variance were used to examine mean differences, and structural equation modelling…

This article considers models involving a single structural equation with latent explanatory and/or latent dependent variables where discrete items are used to measure the latent variables. Our primary focus is the use of scores as proxies for the latent variables and carrying out ordinary least squares (OLS) regression on such scores to estimate…

Our aim was to build a model delineating the relationship between attitudes toward suicide and suicidal behavior and to assess equivalence by applying the model on data from different countries. Representative samples from the general population were approached in Sweden, Norway, and Russia with the Attitudes Toward Suicide (ATTS) questionnaire.…

As computers becomes more ubiquitous in our everyday lives, educational settings are being transformed where educators and students are expected to teach and learn, using computers (Lee, 2003). This study, therefore, explored pre-service teachers' self reported future intentions to use computers in Singapore and Malaysia. A survey methodology was…

The central aim of the present paper is to analyse the degree to which welfare problems accumulate over time and to what extent such an accumulation is related to class position and household formation. We utilize longitudinal data from the Swedish Survey of Living Conditions, following a panel that was first interviewed in 1979 and, thereafter,…

Although SAS PROC CALIS is not designed to perform multigroup comparisons, it is believed that SAS can be "tricked" into doing so for groups of equal size. At present, there are no comprehensive examples of the steps involved in performing a multigroup comparison in SAS. The purpose of this article is to illustrate these steps. We demonstrate…

The present study examined relations among maternal psychological resources, rejecting parenting, and early adolescent antisocial behavior in a sample of 231 low-income mothers and their sons with longitudinal assessments from age 18 months to 12 years. The maternal resources examined were age at first birth, aggressive personality, and empathy.…

In this study, we investigated whether parental smoking-specific communication is related to adolescents' friendship-selection processes. Furthermore, we investigated whether adolescents and their best friends influence each other over time, and what role parents play in this process. In the present study we used data from the Family and Health…

Approximately 40% of college students reported engaging in heavy episodic or "binge" drinking in the 2 weeks prior to being surveyed. Research indicates that college students suffering from depression are more likely to report experiencing negative consequences related to their drinking than other students are. The reasons for this…

This article explores the factors influencing high school students' career aspirations with a study analyzing 141 high school students. The Social Cognitive Career Development Model was utilized to examine the interactive relationships among learning experiences, career self-efficacy, outcome expectations, career interests, and career choices. The…