Continuity,stability, and change in daily emotional experience across adolescence

This longitudinal study examined change in adolescents' daily range of emotional states between early and late adolescence. A sample of 220 youth provided reports on their daily emotions at random times during two 1-week periods. At Time 1 they were in the fifth through eighth grades; 4 years later, at Time 2, they were in the ninth through twelfth grades. Results showed that average emotional states became less positive across early adolescence, but that this downward change in average emotions ceased in grade 10. The results also showed greatest relative instability between youth in the early adolescent years--correlations over time were lower--with stability increasing in late adolescence. Lastly, the study found that adolescents' average emotions had relatively stable relations to life stress and psychological adjustment between early and late adolescence. As a whole, the findings suggest that late adolescence is associated with a slowing of the emotional changes of early adolescence.     

Daily Companionship in Late Childhood and Early Adolescence: Changing Developmental Contexts

The study employs time-sampling data to examine age differences in the quantity and quality of children's and young adolescents' daily experience with their families, friends, and alone. Participants (ages 9-15) carried electronic pagers for 1 week and reported their companionship, location, and affect at random times when signaled by the pagers. Findings show a dramatic decline in amount of time spent with family, with older students reporting half as much time with their families as younger students. Among boys, this family time was replaced by time spent alone; among girls, by time alone and with friends. Affect reported when with family became less positive between the fifth and seventh grade, but was more positive again in the ninth grade for boys. Affect with friends became more favorable across this age period; affect when alone did not vary. These age differences suggest changes in adolescents' daily opportunities for cognitive growth, emotional development, and social support.     

Attention,Scholastic Achievement and Timing of Lessons

Previous research has revealed that lower grade elementary school pupils who differ in their ability to learn to read also differ with respect to the optimal time of day for reading achievement. The present study strove to determine the hours of optimal attention in older pupils who varied in their apparent aptitude for mathematics. A sample of 204 fifth graders and 202 tenth graders were divided into three groups (high, average and low ability) on the basis of their mean yearly mathematics achievement scores. The subjects were asked to report on their attention levels throughout the day. The findings showed that fifth graders' attention levels were especially high in the afternoon, whereas tenth graders reported increased concentration during the morning hours. Among tenth graders, but not among fifth graders, there was a significant interaction between mathematics achievement and attention levels at various times of day. The practical implications of these findings for the planning of school schedules are discussed.     

The development of children's knowledge of temporal structure

Adults have a rich understanding of a number of time systems, but little is known about how this knowledge develops. 3 experiments were conducted to test a model in which the first representations of the days of the week and months of the year have verbal-list properties, and these are later supplemented by image representations. In Experiments 1 and 2, fourth or fifth graders could judge forward relative order for these contents, but not until adolescence could backward order judgments be made accurately. In Experiment 3, fourth graders used a serial process to solve a categorical distance judgment task, whereas older groups shifted to a process with more rapid access to information about the position of remote items. The results are interpreted as supporting the 2-stage model and appear inconsistent with a number of alternative models.     

Adolescents' and parents' reasoning about actual family conflict

This study employed a distinct domain perspective on social-cognitive development to assess reasoning about issues of family conflict. Subjects were 102 fifth through twelfth graders from 2-parent families and their parents. Individually interviewed family members described actual family conflicts and, for each, justified their position on the dispute and reasoned about them from the other's perspective. Parents generated fewer conflicts than did children. Preadolescent to late adolescent families generally agreed that conflicts occurred over the mundane, everyday details of family life, but they did not agree on their interpretation. Adolescents understood but rejected their parents' conventional interpretations of conflicts, reasoning instead in terms of personal choice. Boys' understanding of their parents' conventional perspectives increased significantly with age, whereas girls' understanding was significantly lower in early adolescence, as compared to pre- or late adolescence. The results are discussed in terms of adolescent individuation and parent-child conflict during adolescence.     

A Two-Study Conceptual Replication Investigating the Role of Initial Word-Reading Skills with Response to Intervention for High School Students

This investigation examined the impact of preintervention word-reading ability on reading comprehension outcomes for ninth graders with learning disabilities, reading difficulties, and English learners in treatment and comparison conditions. Secondary data analyses were conducted for two separate but related experimental studies of intensive reading interventions. Both studies provided yearlong intensive reading interventions to ninth graders. The study included replication of a post hoc analysis employed in a previous study of ninth graders who also received 1 year of intervention. Results from both studies demonstrated that the effects of treatment were not moderated by decoding level for reading comprehension. Statistically significant effects of verbal ability were found. These findings suggest the effectiveness of intervention and that higher verbal skills improve students’ comprehension, though the effects were more pronounced for Study One than Study Two.     

Using Self-Generated Drawings to Solve Arithmetic Word Problems

Abstract

In this article, two intervention studies are described that were set up to investigate whether encouraging elementary students to generate drawings of arithmetic word problems facilitates problem-solving performance. The interventions consisted of 60 to 90 min of practice and showed the usefulness of self-generated drawings for solving word problems. The subjects in the first study were first and second graders, and in the second study, fifth graders. The results indicated that the fifth graders improved problem solutions after the intervention, whereas the first and second graders did not. Unlike the first and second graders, the fifth graders generated lots of drawings of word problems. The findings suggest that the nature of the difficulties children experience when solving arithmetic word problems influences their decision to generate drawings.     

The effectiveness of a highly explicit, teacher-directed strategy instruction routine: changing the writing performance of students with learning disabilities

This study examined the effectiveness of a highly explicit, teacher-directed instructional routine used to teach three planning strategies for writing to fourth and fifth graders with learning disabilities. In comparison to peers who received process writing instruction, children who were taught the three planning strategies-goal setting, brainstorming, and organizing-spent more time planning stories in advance of writing and produced stories that were qualitatively better. One month after the end of instruction, students who had been taught the strategies not only maintained their advantage in story quality but also produced longer stories than those produced by their peers who were taught process writing. However, the highly explicit, teacher-directed strategy instructional routine used in this study did not promote transfer to an uninstructed genre, persuasive essay writing. These findings are discussed in terms of their relevance to effective writing instruction practices for students with learning disabilities.     

Change in Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence and Student Achievement: The Role of Intellectual Engagement

Intellectual engagement (IE) refers to enjoyment of intellectual activities and is proposed as causal for knowledge acquisition. The role of IE for cognitive development was examined utilizing 2‐year longitudinal data from 112 ninth graders (average baseline age: 14.7 years). Higher baseline IE predicted higher baseline crystallized ability but not changes therein, and was not associated with fluid ability. Furthermore, IE predicted change in school grades in language but not in mathematics grades or in standardized tests. These findings suggest that IE is not a major predictor of knowledge acquisition in adolescence, where degree of self‐determination in intellectual behaviors may be relatively limited. Open questions for future research are addressed, including reciprocal longitudinal associations between IE and academic and cognitive development.     

Moving toward and away from the world: social approach and avoidance trajectories in anxious solitary youth

This investigation tested the person-by-environment hypothesis that the joint influence of behavioral vulnerability (anxious solitude) and interpersonal adversity (peer exclusion) predicts heightened social avoidance and depression over time. The study assessed 519 fifth and sixth graders 3 times during 1 year. Teachers reported social behavior and peer exclusion; youth reported depression. As hypothesized, anxious solitary youth displayed maintenance or exacerbation of social avoidance and depression in the context of high exclusion, but increased social approach and less depression in the context of low exclusion. Some effects were moderated by sex. The interaction of behavioral vulnerability and peer exclusion was more consistently linked to adjustment changes in anxious solitary youth than in youth with other behavioral profiles.     

Parent–Child Shared Time From Middle Childhood to Late Adolescence: Developmental Course and Adjustment Correlates

The development and adjustment correlates of parent–child social (parent, child, and others present) and dyadic time (only parent and child present) from age 8 to 18 were examined. Mothers, fathers, and firstborns and secondborns from 188 White families participated in both home and nightly phone interviews. Social time declined across adolescence, but dyadic time with mothers and fathers peaked in early and middle adolescence, respectively. In addition, secondborns’ social time declined more slowly than firstborns’, and gendered time use patterns were more pronounced in boys and in opposite‐sex sibling dyads. Finally, youths who spent more dyadic time with their fathers, on average, had higher general self‐worth, and changes in social time with fathers were positively linked to changes in social competence.     

Misconceptions about Motion: Development and Training Effects

2 experiments were performed to examine whether children and adults possess a single-object/single-motion intuition. This intuition involves the view that because all parts of a rigid object move together, they all must move at the same speed. We found that third graders, sixth graders, ninth graders, and adults all responded in accord with this intuition. On problems where the intuition led to errors, a large majority of subjects of all ages answered incorrectly. On problems where it led to successful performance, subjects answered more accurately than on problems where the intuition was not applicable. In addition, the specific errors were those that the intuition yielded, and the intuition fit individual patterns of performance. The intuition not only influenced speed judgments but also judgments of distance traveled. Experiment 2 demonstrated that making sixth graders aware of the intuition and providing them kinesthetic experience that contradicted it produced significant improvements in the children's understanding. Implications for how scientific misconceptions in general can be overcome were discussed.     

Anxious solitude and peer exclusion: a diathesis-stress model of internalizing trajectories in childhood

A diathesis-stress model was proposed in which the joint forces of individual vulnerability (anxious solitude) and interpersonal adversity (peer exclusion) predict depressive symptoms in children over time. Children's (N = 388; 50% female) social behavior, peer exclusion, and emotional adjustment were assessed at kindergarten entry and every spring thereafter through 4th grade, primarily by teacher report. Results indicated that anxious solitude and peer exclusion co-occur in children soon after kindergarten entry and that anxious solitary children who are excluded early on, in comparison with their nonexcluded anxious solitary counterparts, display greater stability in their subsequent display of anxious solitude. As hypothesized, the joint influence of anxious solitude and exclusion predicted the most elevated depressive symptom trajectories.     

The Residual Effects of Cooperative-Learning Experiences: A Two-Year Follow-Up

Abstract

The author investigated how training in small-group and interpersonal behaviors affected children's behavior and interactions as they worked in small groups 2 years later. The authors assigned 52 fifth graders, who had been trained 2 years previously in cooperative group behaviors, to the trained condition and 36 fifth graders, who had not previously been trained, to the untrained condition. Both were reconstituted from the pool of students who had participated previously in group activities. The results showed a residual training effect, with the children in the trained groups being more cooperative and helpful than their untrained peers.     

Examining the unique contributions and developmental stability of individual forms of relational reasoning to mathematical problem solving

Relational reasoning, a higher-order cognitive ability that identifies meaningful patterns among information streams, has been suggested to underlie STEM development. This study attempted to explore the potentially unique contributions of four forms of relational reasoning (i.e., analogy, anomaly, antinomy, and antithesis) to mathematical problem solving. Two separate samples, fifth graders (n = 254) and ninth graders (n = 198), were assessed on their mathematical problem solving ability and the different forms of relational reasoning ability. Linear regression analysis was conducted, with participants’ age, working memory, and spatial skills as covariates. The results showed that analogical and antithetical reasoning abilities uniquely predicted mathematical problem solving. This pattern demonstrated developmental stability across a four-year time frame. The findings clarify the unique significance of individual forms of relational reasoning to mathematical problem solving and call for a shift of research direction to reasoning abilities when exploring dissimilarity-based relations (opposites in particular).     

Conceptualizations of nature: An interpretive study of 16 ninth graders' everyday thinking

The research reported in this article sought to provide a broader understanding of high school science students as persons by describing the personal thoughts, or everyday thinking, about a question relevant to science: What is Nature? The purpose was to gain an understanding of students' fundamental beliefs about the world on the basis that developing scientific literacy can be successful only to the extent that science finds a niche in the cognitive and cultural milieu of students. The theoretical background for this research came from cultural anthropology and the methodology was interpretive, involving student interviews. The assertions of the study in summary form were: (a) The ninth‐grade students in the study tended to discuss Nature using several different perspectives (e.g., religious, aesthetic, scientific, conservationist). A rich breadth of perspectives typically characterized any one student's discussion of Nature. (b) After 9 years of schooling, however, the level of science integration within everyday thinking remained low for many of these ninth graders. In their discussions of Nature, most volunteered little school knowledge of science. They were aware of school science topics such as the ozone layer, rain forests, and the Big Bang theory. Such topics were voluntarily mentioned but usually without elaboration even when asked. (c) Science grade success was not correlated with the concepts these ninth graders typically chose to use in a discussion about the natural world. The students with the most grade success in science had not necessarily grasped fundamental concepts about Nature and science. (d) Regardless of school grade success, including school science grade success, most of the ninth graders attached considerable importance to personal experiences with Nature. Their environmental inclinations were strong. The article ends with a discussion of the implications. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 36: 541–564, 1999     

Intergenerational transmission of out-of-home care in Sweden: A population-based cohort study

The objective of this study is to examine the intergenerational transmission of out-of-home care. This population-based study used data from the Swedish National Registers and included all children born in Sweden between 1990 and 2012 (followed for up to 13 years), whose parents were both born in Sweden between 1973 and 1980 (278 327 children; 145 935 mothers; 146 896 fathers). Cox regression models are used to obtain crude and adjusted hazard ratios (HR) of OHC placement among children based on parents’ history of OHC. Compared with children whose parents both did not have a history of OHC, the risk of being placed in OHC was greater when both parents spent time in OHC (crude HR = 48.70, 95% CI 41.46–57.21; adjusted HR = 3.04, 95% CI = 2.54–3.64), however, children who had only one parent who spent time in care were also at higher risk (mothers only adjusted HR = 2.37, 95% CI = 2.08–2.70; fathers only adjusted HR = 1.33, 95% CI = 1.13–1.55). The crude rate of placement in OHC was highest for children whose parents were placed in care during adolescence, but after adjusting for social and behavioral covariates, children whose parents were in care in early childhood were at greater risk of OHC than children whose parents were in care in adolescence. To reduce this intergenerational transmission of OHC, more supports should be provided to parents who spent time in OHC to ensure a successful transition to parenthood.     

Single parents, stepparents, and the susceptibility of adolescents to antisocial peer pressure

According to a recent report, adolescents living in single-parent households are more likely to engage in deviant activity than are youngsters living with both natural parents, or in single-parent, extended households, allegedly because the presence of an additional adult provides greater control of youngsters' behavior. In the present study, fifth, sixth, eighth, and ninth graders from 1 of 3 family structures (both natural parents, mother alone, or 1 natural parent and a stepparent) were compared with respect to their susceptibility to peer pressure to engage in deviant activity. All comparisons controlled for sex, age, socioeconomic status, maternal employment, and patterns of family decision making. Youngsters living with both natural parents were less susceptible to pressure from their friends to engage in deviant behavior than youngsters living in other family structures. More important, youngsters growing up in stepfamilies--in the presence of an additional adult--were equally at risk for involvement in deviant behavior as were their peers growing up in single-parent households.     

Looking without listening: is audition a prerequisite for normal development of visual attention during infancy?

Potential effects of auditory and other communicative experience on development of visual attention were investigated for four groups of infants at 9, 12, and 18 months of age. Participants included 20 deaf infants with deaf mothers, 19 deaf infants with hearing mothers, 21 hearing infants with hearing mothers, and 20 hearing infants with deaf mothers. Infants' hearing status alone did not associate with patterns of visual attention. Deaf infants with deaf mothers showed significantly longer times in the most advanced attention state (coordinated joint) than did deaf infants with hearing mothers. However, other aspects of experience were associated with group differences. Both deaf and hearing children with deaf mothers who signed spent more time onlooking (or watching) their mothers than did children (deaf or hearing) with hearing mothers. Hearing children with hearing mothers spent more time looking at objects than did children with deaf mothers. Despite these differences in time in various attention states, the general trajectory of development of each of the attention states was similar across groups. Results indicate that early visual attention is associated with and potentially influenced by a complex interaction of maturation, communicative experiences, and other developing skills.     

Developmental and individual differences in girls' sex-typed activities in middle childhood and adolescence

Girls' time in sex-typed leisure activities was studied across 2 years in middle childhood ( n =98, M =8.2 years in Year 1), early adolescence ( n =106, M =11.7 years), and middle adolescence ( n =86, M =14.9 years). In annual home interviews, White middle-class girls, mothers, and fathers rated their gendered attitudes, interests, and personality qualities, and saliva samples were used to assess testosterone; activity data were collected in 7 nightly phone interviews. Girls spent more time in feminine than masculine activities except in early adolescence. Girls' and parents' personalities and interests predicted sex-typed activities at each developmental period, but associations between testosterone and activities emerged only in middle childhood.