The nature of adolescent sexuality, pregnancy and childbearing is undergoing important transformations that have made early parenthood more visible and problematic. A review of the literature confirms that adolescent pregnancy is far from a random event. Research indicates differences, often substantial, among those who have sex or abstain and…

This article discusses the results of two qualitative studies concerning a group of 58 African American girls attending an urban school district. Findings from the first study document year one of a longitudinal project examining how the girls develop socially and academically in a state-operated school district. Data from the second study…

To ascertain the incidence of drug use in a rural area and to provide insight into the covariates of illegal drug use which might be useful in developing prevention programs, data were collected in the spring of 1981 from 2,060 or 83.2% of all students grades 8 through 12 in a southern Georgia county. Data were collected during regularly scheduled…

Socially rejected students are actively excluded for long periods of time by many of their peers at school and are often the recipients of verbal or physical abuse. Although most consideration of this problem has focused on rejected students, social rejections could be considered as a group phenomenon, determined by the structure of the social…

Organizational socialization concerns the manner in which an individual learns the role of his or her career in the dominant setting in which the work occurs. From the functionalist approach, the role of teacher carries predetermined work attitudes, status, behaviors, and norms into which a beginning teacher is passively socialized. The…

This report examines the process by which teenage youth develop expectations about their future educational achievements and occupational attainments. The focus of the study is on the dynamic feedback between the expectations of youth and parental expectations for the youth. The impact of academic performance, mental ability, and socioeconomic…

This paper presents a model student leadership program and an evaluation of its effectiveness. This model, which considers positive personal contact between students and staff to be a key element in student leadership training, is designed to have a positive impact on student development and campus life. The basic training strategy is explained as…

The narrative performances of Navajo children were examined to determine the ways in which the skills of competently structuring a narrative are informally learned within the peer group. Ten- and eleven-year-old Navajo children, living near Window Rock, Arizona, were evaluated in telling stories about the most traditional figures of Navajo belief,…

This study examines the manner in which a group of kindergarten children viewed their kindergarten experience, how those views changed over time, and the extent to which those views were affected by background variables and preschool experiences. Eighty-three randomly selected urban kindergarten children were interviewed three times over a 7-month…

In a study demonstrating that Black English was target for Hispanic boys acquiring English as second language, it was shown that extensive peer contact with Blacks was necessary but not sufficient for acquisition of two features of Black English (negative concord and distributive "be") and that choice of Blacks as reference played no role in…

Motivating students through preparing their writing for publication and then publishing it offers a better alternative to the task analysis method of teaching remedial writing to university students. One teacher's experiences at the Summer Bridge Program at Sonoma State University are described. (MLW)

To test a facilitative-constraint model, data about marijuana use was collected from 4,859 high school students in 2 rural southern Georgia counties. The model was useful for predicting frequency of use and classifying students as users, experimenters, and nonusers. Access to drugs and identification with drug-oriented groups were strong…

The purpose of this comic-activity book is to teach children how to be safe and how to deal with peer pressure. The book centers on the characters McGruff the Crime Dog, his nephew Scruff, and American Indian children living on a reservation. Scruff, who is a child figure, encounters situations that children may experience or worry about,…

This article describes the implementation of the cooperative development (CD) technique by two professors at a Japanese university. With this technique, colleagues work together by adopting the roles of "speaker" and "understander" to support each other's process of addressing teaching concerns. The skills required for CD…

The aim of this study was to assess the interrelations of social support and school attitudes as predictors of achievement across a culturally and economically diverse sample of preadolescent children. Parent and peer support were assessed along with parent and peer attitudes toward school. Achievement indices were the child's own attitudes,…