This article discusses Cathedral High School's peer program that involves seniors serving as mentors to freshmen students to help them transition to high school. Students pour into Cathedral from more than 60 different grade schools, and the administration saw a need to connect these students with their peers in order to retain them. The program…

Emotional control has traditionally been emphasized in Chinese culture. The primary purpose of the study was to examine the relevance of early affect to social functioning in Chinese children. A sample of children, initially at two years of age, and their mothers in the People's Republic of China participated in this two-year longitudinal study.…

Direct observation in natural settings has been recognized for nearly a century as an important methodology to capture the nuances of children's behavior for research, clinical assessment, and program evaluation. These ecologically valid descriptive data complement more widely used behavior rating scales to evaluate the impact of intervention…

Many children within the school population are likely to bully their peers to a varying degree. The purpose of this research was to determine if children who often bully their peers experience more behavioral difficulties than children who bully their peers less often. Using the Behavior Assessment System for Children-Teacher Form (Reynolds &…

Close relationships among children and adolescents are ordinarily considered to encompass friendliness and fun. Recent studies, however, reveal that many friendships have dark sides consisting of competitiveness, hostility, and conflict. Relationships based on aversion and antipathy may turn out to have major developmental implications, but more…

In certain contexts, some academically advanced students employ coping strategies that manipulate the visibility of their ability. These strategies may include denying giftedness, hiding giftedness, gaining favor by helping others, denying the negative impact on peer acceptance, conforming to mask giftedness, and minimizing focus on popularity.…

Promoting access to the general curriculum for students with disabilities has emerged as a central theme of recent legislative and policy initiatives. Ensuring that students with severe disabilities benefit fully from the myriad learning and social opportunities available through the general curriculum remains an important challenge, particularly…

This article reports on a study regarding the school-identification of 1819 first-year students in secondary vocational education. We measured the school-identification of these adolescents and used the perspective of self-regulation to define three blocks of potential determinants, including the students' personal goals (1) their appraisals of…

Joseph, a student with autism in Ms. Mendez's inclusion kindergarten class, experienced difficulty attending during group activities. He spent a significant amount of time looking at his hands and quoting parts of his favorite videos. Attempts to engage Joseph resulted in vocal protests and, at times, mild aggression. Ms. Mendez realized that she…

The director and two teachers in an inclusive preschool, faced with forces within and outside the school that challenged school policies and practices affecting children with special needs and their families, responded by engaging in a year-long process of practitioner research. This voluntary, systematic, and intentional collaborative study of…

Fagan (1986, p. 859) stated many years ago that "school psychology has survived the complex interaction between education and psychology, and will continue to do so in future". Applied and adapted to South(ern) Africa of 2007, one may ask whether inclusive education will survive the complex interaction with the HIV and AIDS pandemic, and…

In this article, we summarize the findings from eight separate focus group studies, conducted with various stakeholders--special education teachers, general education teachers, administrators, school psychologists, students with learning disabilities, parents of students with learning disabilities, teacher educators, and higher education faculty…

This study examined the effect of a social-behavioral learning strategy intervention (SODA) on the social interaction skills of 4 elementary school children with Asperger syndrome (AS). More specifically, the study investigated the effect of SODA training on the abilities of 4 children with AS to participate in cooperative learning activities,…

The theme for this issue of "Every Child" is "Social and Emotional Development." Contents include an editorial by Alison Elliott, "Building a Quality Early Childhood Sector," a guest statement by Louise Tarrant, National Secretary of the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union (LHMU), titled "Taking Big Steps…

The process of school-empowerment ultimately may be intellectual: an awareness and understanding by schools as unique collective learning communities that new school structures, roles, and relationships are necessary in the first place. First, preliminary results from field studies of schools undergoing restructuring are used to show that school…