Student-teacher relationships that improve over time may help slow or prevent declines in student motivation. In a diverse sample of 1,274 middle and high school students from three schools, this mixed-methods study found that those who improved in developmental relationships with teachers reported greater academic motivation, and more positive…

Student-teacher relationships that improve over time may help slow or prevent declines in student motivation. In a diverse sample of 1,274 middle and high school students from three schools, this mixed-methods study found that those who improved in developmental relationships with teachers reported greater academic motivation, and more positive…

Executive functions (EFs) show promise as important mediators of adolescent academic performance. However, the expense of measuring EFs accurately has restricted most field-based research on them to smaller, non-longitudinal studies of homogeneous populations with specific diagnoses. We therefore monitored the development of 259 diverse, at-risk…

This longitudinal study of Mexican-American youth and emerging adults examines several ecodevelopmental factors longitudinally predicting high school and college graduation. Data from 1257 Mexican-American youth (including those born in Mexico and whose families are from Mexico) from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add…

Stereotype threat has been shown to have deleterious impacts on the short- and long-term academic performance and psychological well-being of racial and ethnic minority students. Psychological variables related to this identity threat represent significant sources of achievement and attainment gaps relative to nonstereotyped Asian and white…

We examined 482,418 students who took the ACT in the seventh grade and again in high school, taking an exploratory analytic approach to examine academic growth trends from 1996 to 2017. Predictors included sociodemographics, interests, high school (HS) characteristics, HS coursework and GPA, and extracurriculars, which explained 25% of the…

Few studies have investigated school-based, positive development for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) youth, despite knowledge of their heightened negative school experiences compared to heterosexual youth (e.g., school victimization). This study examines associations among participation in Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA)--related social…

Studies of student risk of school dropout have shown that present predictors of at-risk status do not accurately identify a large percentage of students who eventually drop out. Through the analysis of the entire Grade 1-12 longitudinal cohort-based grading histories of the class of 2006 for two school districts in the United States, the author…

Children who are homeless or in foster care change schools more often than their non-mobile peers. The impact of school mobility increases their risk of academic failure (Evans, 1996; Ingersoll, Scamman, & Eckerling, 1989; Mao, 1997, Mehana & Reynolds, 2003; Reynolds & Wolf, 1999). Laws enforcing the right of students to remain in…

This study investigated the links between racial discrimination and school engagement and the roles of racial socialization and ethnic identity as protective factors in those linkages in a sample of 148, sixth through twelfth grade African American adolescents from working and middle-class two-parent families. In home interviews, youth described…

This study uses two waves of data to examine the relationships among racial socialization, racial discrimination, and academic achievement outcomes in a sample of 144 African American male adolescents. Using latent class analyses, the authors identified four patterns of adolescent-reported racial socialization experiences: Positive Socialization,…

This study extends previous research on the social psychological implications of pubertal timing to education by applying a life course framework to data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and from the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement Study. Early pubertal timing, which has previously been associated with major…