Communities are critical arenas for adolescent development. This study uses mixed methods to assess contextual correlates to community connectedness in 8th, 10th, and 12th grade youth. The survey examined the relationship between community connectedness and four developmental supports: safety, community monitoring, creative outlets, and meaningful…

Background: Despite a large literature on bullying, few studies simultaneously examine different dimensions of the phenomenon or consider how they vary by demographic characteristics. As a result, research findings in this area have been inconsistent. This article focuses on 2 dimensions of bullying behaviors--aggression and victimization--and…

The present study was designed to investigate stability and changes in prosocial behavior and the parent and peer correlates of prosocial behavior in rural adolescents. Participants were from a rural, low SES community in the Eastern United States. The participants were in 7th, 8th, and 9th grades at Time 1 and 10th, 11th, and 12th grades at Time…

This study examined the effectiveness of a Question Exploration Routine and associated graphic organizer for enhancing the performance of students of diverse abilities when assessed on knowledge and comprehension of content and quality of written responses. Participants were 36 students with and without learning disabilities (LD) in Grades 9…

It has been almost 30 years since the last systematic look at writing instruction in middle schools and high schools in the United States (Applebee, Writing). Since that report, there have been a number of significant changes in the contexts in which teachers teach and in which their students learn to write. Stretching back to the 1969-70 school…

This report describes the development of grade norms for timed-writing performance in two modes of writing: persuasive and descriptive. These norms are based on objective and automatically computed measures of writing quality in grammar, usage, mechanics, style, vocabulary, organization, and development. These measures are also used in the…

A total of three hundred and fifteen (n = 315) gifted students from the 10th and 12th grade from the United States (n = 102), China (n = 125) and Germany (n = 88) were surveyed regarding their motivation and self-regulation in chemistry learning. A 3 x 2 x 2 MANOVA revealed "nation" as having the largest major effect on these variables.…

The present study examines how exposure to relational aggression at school is associated with adolescents' perceptions of, and participation in, a hostile school environment. Participants were 1,335 African American and European American adolescents in grades 7 through 12 (52% female, 49% African American). Results indicate that exposure to…

The abuse of anabolic steroids by teenagers--that is, their use without a prescription--is a health concern. Anabolic steroids are synthetic forms of the hormone testosterone that can be taken orally, injected, or rubbed on the skin. Although a 2006 survey funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) found that less than 3 percent of 12th…

Outlook is the monthly newsletter for the Council for American Private Education (CAPE). Each issue contains information relating to private education such as: new legislation and regulations, the most recent research, court rulings, national trends, federal initiatives, private school news briefs, and more. This issue contains the following…

The relationship between musical training and general intellectual capacity as well as academic achievement has been discussed in numerous contexts. In our study, we examined the relationship between participation and achievement in music and achievement in academic courses, based on data from three consecutive British Columbia student cohorts.…

This study evaluated effects of the "Iowa Strengthening Families Program," a family-focused universal preventive intervention, on growth patterns of adolescent internalizing (anxiety and depressive symptoms) and monthly polysubstance use (alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, inhalants, and other illicit drugs), as well as the association between…

The authors applied linear dynamic models to longitudinal data to examine the dynamics of reading and cognition from 1st to 12th grade. They used longitudinal data (N=445) from the Connecticut Longitudinal Study (S. E. Shaywitz, B. A. Shaywitz, J. M. Fletcher, & M. D. Escobar, 1990) to map the dynamic interrelations of various scales of the…

This paper examines the a-priori ideological orientation of pupils in two different types of schools in the kibbutzim in Israel, the movement schools (Hatakam or Hashomer Hatzair) and the mixed schools. The paper attempts to show how different educational circumstances and environments develop a distinct a-priori ideological orientation in…

This bulletin discusses the mathematics and science course enrollment trends of secondary students in Australia, which are of national concern because of the low participation rates overall and because of the gender imbalance in enrollment numbers. Statistics are reported for 12th-grade mathematics and science course enrollment, and expectations…