Conventional explanations attributing the high infant mortality rate in United States to the prevalence of poverty and lack of adequate health care do not tell the whole story. Contributions of parental behavior, lifestyles, and public health care availability versus utilization must be examined in determining public policies to address the…

Studied characteristics distinguishing successful and failing Hispanic innercity high school students, using 24 high dropout-risk and 24 low dropout-risk Hispanic tenth graders (22 males and 26 females). When compared to high-risk counterparts, low-risk students were more satisfied with their school and maintained social groups predominantly free…

Attempted to discover patterns of alcohol, drug, and tobacco use among public school children in New Brunswick using Provincial School Drug Survey (PSDS), an existing large-scale assessment. Recoded variables in PSDS dataset to derive profiles of typical tobacco, cannabis, and alcohol users. Found increase in predictive accuracy of regression…

Studied the longitudinal stability of measures of peer acceptance, social status, and social reputation and the role of children's ages relative to classmates during the transition from same-age kindergarten to mixed-age ungraded primary classes. Found that overall peer acceptance and aggressive social reputation were moderately stable. Half of…

Examined role of home social relationships as predictors of social functioning in first years of school. Found that the quality of different family relationships provided relatively independent and complementary information about early social functioning in school, with more limited evidence for compensatory or protective processes at work.…

Influences of disciplinary differences on college students' self-perceived gains in critical thinking and communication skills were examined in relation to student background, experiences in the major, and college experience variables. The proposed theoretical model accounted for some variance in self-perceived gains. The variable associated most…

The project described in this article investigates student explanations of truancy and dropout, and associated demographic and academic variables among Cambodian students (N=23) at a comprehensive high school. Results suggest that students at high risk of truancy can be identified before they start high school on the basis of their behavior in…

Motivation for returning to higher education was assessed for 117 adult female college graduates with children and 118 students who had withdrawn before graduation. Motivation was found related to previous education, age, marital status, life cycle stage, employment satisfaction, family support. Interrupters and persisters were generally similar;…

This study examined cross-sectional correlates of smoking during early and late adolescence to compare patterns of prediction of smoking at both stages. Intention to smoke was the strongest predictor of smoking during both stages, particularly in late adolescence, as well as being the strongest predictor of changes in smoking. (SM)

Develops a model of progressive school reform based on recent work in institutionalist theory. The authors present findings from preliminary empirical tests of the model, which provide strong support for an institutionalist account and considerably weaker support for political explanations of reform. (GR)

Comments on research problems raised in this special issue. Suggests that recent research highlights the nature of the multiple processes underlying variability in child and adolescent adjustment. Views variability as a function of covarying influences from multiple domains, operating on specific developmental outcomes across a background of time…

This study draws from the National Center for Early Development and Learning's Multi-State Pre-Kindergarten Study to examine the extent to which program, classroom, and teacher attributes of the program ecology predict observed quality and teacher-child interactions in a sample of 238 classrooms representing 6 states' pre-kindergarten programs.…

Most undergraduate programs require completion of a mathematics course, but pass rates in these courses are often low. To determine predictors of student success in 100-level mathematics courses at the University of Southern Maine, we used a questionnaire to collect information on possible predictors of grade (student demographics, attitude,…

Research findings: Growth across 6 months to 8 years of age, assessed at seven time points, for daily living and cognitive skills was compared for term (n = 122), very low birth weight (VLBW) children of low (n = 114) and high (n = 73) medical risk and lower socioeconomic status (SES). Dramatic declines in daily living skills were found for all…

Three aspects of racial-ethnic identity (REI)--feeling connected to one's racial-ethnic group (Connectedness), being aware that others may not value the in-group (Awareness of Racism), and feeling that one's in-group is characterized by academic attainment (Embedded Achievement)--were hypothesized to promote academic achievement. Youth randomly…