Using a snowball technique, in-depth interviews were conducted with 108 girls emanating from seven demographically dissimilar social networks. Girls were asked to classify 58 items as either a risk or protective factor for smoking initiation and then to assign an importance weighting to each. All items except one (worries about her weight) were…

We report the results of latent growth model analyses examining the continuity of cocaine use among adolescents. This study examined a sample of 278 justice-involved juveniles completing at least one of three follow-up interviews as part of a National Institute on Drug Abuse funded study. Latent growth models were analyzed examining (1) changes in…

A measurement model was analyzed to demonstrate a differential distribution and cumulative exposure to psychosocial risk and protective influences of adolescent drug use among ethnically-diverse adolescent samples. The sample included U.S.-born (US) Latino (N = 837), foreign-born (FB) Latino (N = 447), White (N = 632), and African American (N =…

In order to become productive members of an academic community, it is important for students to master its procedural practices. By adapting Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital, habitus, and field, we examined procedural practices of first-graders from minority and low-socioeconomic-status backgrounds in the context of student-led literacy…

Commonly accepted ideas, on the one hand, about how small groups in a writing class should work and, on the other hand, psychological research about what makes a small group work well are not consistent. Social psychologist Clovis Shepherd claims that the "popular notion that the democratic ideal is a group in which all members exert an equal…

The goal of this study was to describe the potential educational opportunities that lie in self-directed age-mixed interactions among children and adolescents. A qualitative analysis was used to generate ideas about goals and benefits of such interactions. The setting for the study was Sudbury Valley School (Massachusetts), a private school with…

The author examines the influence of peer groups on the formation of young people's political orientations and predispositions toward political behavior. Analysis of the findings leads to conclusions about the existence of a "teen culture" in the Soviet Union and the socializing capability of the politically-inspired youth organizations.…

In order to assess the potential role of imitation in early socialization, a study was conducted to investigate the content and development of children's imitative behavior in the home. Data consisted of incidents of immediate and deferred imitation collected over a 4- to 8-month period by mothers trained in observational recording. Subjects…

Article investigated the process of play and its relation to creative ability. (RK)

Empirically examines a model describing causal relations among four social-psychological factors--organizational climate, managerial leadership, peer leadership, and group process--in organizational functioning. (Author)

Description of a simulation that uses the Tachai system for determining students' grades on their participation and oral reports in a graduate seminar on contemporary China. (ND)

The literature on teaching evaluation has long recognized that it is simply not possible now, or perhaps ever, to isolate from among all the variables that are interacting the individual teacher's contribution to changes in the learner, many of which are complex, subtle, and may not be observable until much later in the student's life. Thus, other…

This issue of communique contains a wide variety of materials, information, and practices for counselors. The feature articles focus on the selection of peer social models and on the involvement of non-classroom personnel in the modification of elementary student's behavior. The publication also presents abstracts of materials on counseling,…

In this study a method of teaching composition using individualized learning and peer grouping was developed, implemented, and evaluated. The model was used with 30 students in a tenth grade English class while a control group of 30 students received more traditional instruction. It was found that significantly greater gains were made by the…

The major thrust of this experiment was to investigate the effects of peer influence, functioning with instructor influence, on the self-concept of students during a series of four speeches given in a basic speech course. The self-insight score of each subject was correlated with the average grade of the four speeches, and the relationship between…