The elements of school climate include the safety and overall well-being of students, as well as students' sense of connectedness and schools' discipline practices and physical environments. In 2012, 48% of suspensions in California were due to "willful defiance," an overly broad and subjective category defined as "disrupting school…

Background: Diagnosis of "specific" language impairment traditionally required nonverbal IQ to be within normal limits, often resulting in restricted access to clinical services for children with lower NVIQ. Changes to DSM-5 criteria for language disorder removed this NVIQ requirement. This study sought to delineate the impact of varying…

Black students are issued school discipline sanctions at rates higher than members of other racial and ethnic groups, underscoring the need for professional development that addresses this gap. In 86 secondary school classrooms, a randomized controlled trial examined the effects of a 2-year teacher-coaching program, My Teaching Partner Secondary…

There has been significant interest in examining the developmental factors that predispose individuals to chronic criminal offending. This body of research has identified some social-environmental risk factors as potentially important. At the same time, the research producing these results has generally failed to employ genetically sensitive…

University/college can be a challenging time as students face developmental tasks such as building new social networks and achieving academically. Social anxiety may be disadvantageous in this setting given that social situations often include drinking and individuals with social anxiety tend to self-medicate through alcohol use. However, findings…

Longitudinal data from 746 adolescents in Toronto, Canada (54% females), was gathered in eight waves over seven years (1995 through 2001), beginning when the youths were 10 to 12 years old (mean age = 11.8, SD = 1.2 years). Five trajectories of substance use were identified: chronic-high, childhood onset-rapid high, childhood onset-moderate,…

To identify ways that national culture, school characteristics, and individual attributes impact the victimization of students in Grade 8, data from the United States and three East Asian countries (i.e., Japan, S. Korea, and Taiwan) were compared using the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Hierarchical Liner…

The present study examined teachers' domain-specific self-efficacy (TSE) in relation to individual students with a variety of social-emotional behaviors in class. Using a sample of 526 third- to sixth-grade students and 69 teachers, multilevel modeling was conducted to examine students' externalizing, internalizing, and prosocial behaviors as…

Prevention in School (PS) is a comprehensive program which aims to improve the learning climate and reduce problem behavior in elementary schools. Core components are teaching of school rules, praise and rewards to support prosocial behavior, and a forum involving parents. This trial investigated the effects of PS on its intended outcomes, and…

Classrooms tend to be absolute spaces, places where fluidity is rejected and nearly everything--from people, to ideas, to practices and policies--is viewed and organized through binary logic. Because binary logic is implicitly accepted as the natural order in schools and the structures resulting from it are highly unmalleable, individuals who…

The study investigated early years teachers' understanding and use of graphic symbols, defined as the visual representation(s) used to communicate one or more "linguistic" concepts, which can be used to facilitate science learning. The study was conducted in Cyprus where six early years teachers were observed and interviewed. The results…

This longitudinal study, conducted among a sample of Finnish primary-school children, examined the proposition that a single high-quality relationship (either with a teacher or a parent) can buffer against adjustment problems. Teachers rated the externalizing problems and prosocial behaviors of 378 children in Grade 1 and again in Grade 2.…

This study attempted to establish and quantify the connections between parenting, offspring psychosocial adjustment, and the epigenome. The participants, 35 African American young adults (19 females and 16 males; age = 17-29.5 years), represented a subsample of a 3-wave longitudinal 15-year study on the developmental trajectories of low-income…

Using latent class analysis (LCA), this study identified a dyadic taxonomy of delinquent youth categorized by varying types of maternal-youth reporting discrepancies (i.e., youth < maternal, youth > maternal) within a sample of 764 14-year-old high-risk youth. Four distinctive subgroups of youth were identified, two of which reported more…

This paper is situated at the intersection of two trends in education research: a growing emphasis on the importance of co-cognitive traits and emergence of research-practice partnerships to more effectively scale effective practices. Our partnership focused on building student ownership and responsibility for their learning, which means creating…