This paper empirically examines the underlying premise of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) school choice provision that students will perform better when they are given the opportunity to transfer from persistently low-performing schools to higher performing schools. We focus on students who move from schools that must offer choice under NCLB in a…

This paper presents the research and methodology and analyses used for the "Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades" research. This appendix contains the following sections: (1) Overview; (2) Constructing the Survey Data File; (3) Constructing Composite Independent Variables (Subdomains); (4) Constructing Longitudinal Outcome Variables; (5)…

This study investigated the psychometric properties of the Loneliness and Social Dissatisfaction Scale (LSDS) in a sample of African-American and Hispanic-American children. Participants were a non-clinical sample (N = 186) of children ages 11 to 13 in the fifth and sixth grades in a school in the Metropolitan New York area. Confirmatory factor…

The present study examined the independent and interactive relations of effortful control and two family environment variables (parent-adolescent conflict and negative family relations) on the subsequent conduct problems and depressive symptoms of 459 European American and Latino adolescents between the ages of 10 and 14. Hierarchical regression…

The current study investigated how ethnicity and gender affect changes in the self-esteem of early adolescents during the middle school years. Self-report data were collected from more than 4,000 early adolescents from three ethnic groups: European American, African American, and Hispanic and analyzed using a consecutive three-year cross-sectional…

This study examined the effect of a computer-enhanced problem-based learning (PBL) environment on middle school students' learning, investigating the relationship among students' self-efficacy, attitude toward science, and achievement. As Bandura defined it (1986), self-efficacy refers to the beliefs people have about whether or not they can…

One thousand twenty-four African American and Latino sixth graders participated in a study examining the moderating role of pubertal development on the relation between peer victimization and adolescent self-worth, depressed mood, and physical symptoms using peer and self-reported victimization. It was hypothesized that early-maturing girls who…

How does one turn a class of sixth graders who are uncomfortable with writing, unfamiliar with art supplies, but good at fidgeting and bickering, into a community that achieves literary, artistic, and civic success? In the spring of 2003, Kestrel Heights teachers asked the authors to team up and help their sixth grade students create something…

In this article, the author describes how Math/Science Institute (M/SI) in New York City prepares minority students to take the rigorous entrance exam for the city's three specialized science high schools: Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Technical. M/SI was created in 1995 by Ramon Cortines, who was then chancellor of New York City's…

There are many factors associated with academic success at school. In addition to having the requisite cognitive abilities and scholastic skills, students need to feel that school is a place in which they belong. This study examines factors related to perceptions of school belonging for a sample of Latino elementary school students. Participants…

Purpose: To determine (1) the prevalence of use, (2) risk and protective factors for use of inhalants in Florida youth. Methods: The Florida Youth Substance Abuse Survey 2004 is a comprehensive assessment of youth substance abuse attitudes and practices obtained by sampling youth from sixty-five counties. Results: The sample consisted of 60,345…

Depression in urban Hispanic adolescents can have negative influences on their ability to acquire a sound education. This study was conducted on 191 urban Hispanic adolescents ages 13-18. The findings indicated that (a) Hispanic females were more depressed than Hispanic males, (b) 42% of the participants had been retained a grade, (c) 7% had…

This report uses a unique set of data obtained from the Kids Integrated Data System (KIDS), which is housed at the University of Pennsylvania's Cartographic Modeling Laboratory. The KIDS system merges individual-level data on young people from the School District of Philadelphia and the city's social service agencies, including the Department of…

Early adolescents may lack the cognitive and metacognitive skills necessary for effective inquiry learning. In particular, they are likely to have a nonnormative mental model of multivariable causality in which effects of individual variables are neither additive nor consistent. Described here is a software-based intervention designed to…

We examined the relation of overt and relational victimization to depressive symptoms, fear of negative evaluation (FNE), social avoidance, and loneliness in a sample of Hispanic and African-American children. The Social Experience Questionnaire, Children's Depression Inventory, Social Anxiety Scale for Children--Revised, and Asher Loneliness…