This white paper was prepared for Staying the Course: High Standards and Improved Graduation Rates, a joint project of Achieve, Inc. and Jobs for the Future. Its goal is to provide policymakers with an overview of research about the dropout problem and the best strategies for building an early warning data system that can signal which students and…

Today's students experience a great deal of pressure to succeed in school. Since predictors of academic performance are widely used to assess student capabilities, the relationship between one such test, the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), and academic success are examined in this paper. The focus here is on the non-cognitive variables…

In previous research, children's empathy has been positively related to guilt and unrelated to shame. In the present study, it was predicted that guilt and empathy would have a curvilinear relationship, while shame and empathy were expected to be inversely related. Participating were 115 children: somewhat less than half were ages 8-9 years, while…

Noting that family structure has an impact on a child's development, this study investigated the relationships among family structure, self-concept, and peer relations with kindergarten children. Interviews were conducted with 154 kindergarten children from 6 different classrooms and from different socio-economic backgrounds. The Woolner Preschool…

This study used data from the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) to look at the influences on choice of college for students who applied for financial aid and those who did not apply. Logistic regression was used to assess how background characteristics, academic predictors, and expectations were related to the selection of a four-year…

This handbook is designed to teach communities how to develop an effective juvenile firesetter intervention program. The six chapters of this handbook can be viewed as the six building blocks essential to construct a successful program. The cornerstone of the blueprint is understanding the personality profiles of juvenile firesetters and their…

This mini-research project examined middle school students' participation in and identification with school as a social unit. The study used a student survey to explore: (1) middle schoolers' perceptions of their family educational culture, instructional quality in their school, and their ability/academic self-efficacy; (2) their patterns of…

This policy brief describes the components of a computer model to compare different financing approaches for universal early care and education programs as developed by the Financing Universal Early Care and Education (ECE) for America's Children Project. The brief also discusses lessons learned from analyzing key features of existing…

This study explored experiential factors underlying cigarette smoking by administering a questionnaire consisting of the Rosenberg Self-esteem scale and items assessing smoking habits and motivations to 115 college students and 108 high school students. Directionally adjusted items were totaled to create summary scores for the four hypothesized…

This article discusses the application of self-efficacy beliefs on career development. This theory was introduced by Hackett and Betz (1981) and has received many extensive studies. There are many factors that may influence career self-efficacy such as gender, culture, parental, and family backgrounds. The methods of increasing career…

Problem behavior is a widespread phenomenon in schools. The present paper examines the consequences of problem behavior (disruptive behavior, physical aggression) in grade 7 on psychosocial adjustment (self-esteem and social self-concepts) in grade 10, controlling for psychosocial adjustment. Results suggest that problem behavior in grade 7 had…

This paper reviews literature in the past 60 years about the relationship between music experience and language reading. Results of the literature review fall into three categories: the first group of studies (group I) indicates that music experience benefits language reading due to six transfers of learning--prediction skill, whole-to-part…

This study examined the impact of parental marriage quality on two aspects of self-esteem in their adolescent children, mediated by parent-adolescent relationship quality. Participating in the study were mothers, fathers, and 16- to 18-year-olds from 54 intact families. The first assessment was completed before the adolescents left middle school,…

This report focuses on the activities of the National Institute of Justice in 1998. It begins by discussing the organization and its financial data. Funding growth and collaborative activities since 1994 are also described. Overviews of basic and applied research, technology development, testing the research and technology, initiatives with other…

This paper presents the results of a two-part survey that investigated elementary classroom teachers' awareness of the relevance of students' spelling performance to the identification of reading disability. In part one, 61 of 84 surveyed teachers of grades 2, 3, 4, and 5 (73%) and 16 of 22 school psychologists (73%) indicated that they do,…