Because literacy skills are critical for most academic subject matters, researchers have become increasingly interested in understanding children's motivation in this domain as a way to increase academic success. In this study, we extend previous work by looking at the heterogeneity of children's motivational changes in literacy across Grades…

A conservative estimate is that one in six children in school today has a parent dependent on or addicted to alcohol or other drugs. This places these students at high risk for social and emotional problems, as well as for school failure, drug use, and delinquency. Schools, however, are a logical place to reach them. Identifying children of those…

This study reports on an examination of the factor structure underlying reading performance in a sample of urban, dysfluent children. Participants were 140 second and third graders identified as exhibiting reading difficulties stemming from inefficient word and/or nonword reading. Consistent with a more complex view of reading, the results of…

The importance of emergent literacy skills as a foundation for proficient reading has led to the development of interventions to teach these skills. These interventions are particularly important for children from disadvantaged homes because they often lack the home literacy experiences necessary for building foundational literacy skills prior to…

Relations were examined between children's sleep and their externalizing and internalizing symptoms. Longitudinal relations were examined when children were in 3rd (T1) and 5th (T2) grades, and cross-sectional relations were assessed at T2. Participants included 176 children at T1 (M = 8.68 years) and 141 children at T2 (M = 10.70 years). Sleep…

Despite the numerous, disparate, and often unfair demands placed upon educators to be all things to all students, they need to be prepared to teach better behavior every day. Perhaps of even greater importance is finding ways of becoming tougher in not giving up on them when they say and do things that are annoying, obnoxious, and inappropriate so…

Many African American adolescents who enter high school with low achievement are at-risk for being perceived as defiant and uncooperative by their classroom teachers. This generalized view of risk, however, offers little understanding of the differentiated behavior these students have with their teachers. The study followed 35 African American…

Through two school case studies in Cyprus, in this paper I explore the role of small internal collaborative networks in promoting school improvement. The analysis of the two cases revealed a series of interrelated themes which indicated issues related to school improvement, and actually, it provided evidence that small internal collaborative…

Friendship factors have been implicated in adolescent suicidality, but this relationship has not been verified across ethnicities. This study examined suicidality and friendship problems (i.e., social isolation, poor friendship quality, friends' school disconnection, and friends' delinquency) among Mexican American adolescents, an understudied,…

This article presents a review of the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test, Second Edition (KBIT-2; Kaufman & Kaufman, 2004b), which is designed to provide a brief, individualized format for measuring verbal and nonverbal intelligence in children and adults from the ages of 4 years, 0 months through 90 years, 11 months. The test consists of only…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of the "I Can Use Effort" strategy on the quality of student verbal contributions and IEP participation of third and fourth grade students with high-incidence disabilities. Using a multiple probe across participants design, results indicated a functional relationship between the "I Can Use…

Objective: Children with ADHD have an increased risk of poor academic performance. It is important to identify cognitive processes that may be related to this academic failure. In Western schooling systems, especially language processing skills may be of relevance. The present study, therefore, compares the ability to comprehend complex sentences…

A disproportionally high number of children with specific language impairment (SLI) develop dyslexia. Yet it is hard to predict which individual child is at risk. This article presents a longitudinal study of phonological and early literacy development of 18 Dutch-speaking children with SLI, compared to 18 typically developing controls over a…

Concern about school safety has increased in recent years (Sprague et al., 1999), leading to a greater interest in methods such as Positive Behavior Support (PBS), which has been found to be successful at creating safe environments through use of preventive methods and the development of proactive systems for at-risk student populations (Horner,…

Targeted educational voucher schemes [TEVS] are often proposed for poor children in developing countries. This article explores the design of an effective TEVS using three policy instruments: regulation, support services, and finance. The regulation design addresses the rules that must be adhered to by participating households, children, and…