This study reports on the initial development and validation of the Student Subjective Wellbeing Questionnaire (SSWQ) with a sample of 1,002 students in Grades 6-8. The SSWQ is a 16-item self-report instrument for assessing youths' subjective wellbeing at school, which is operationalized via 4 subscales measuring school connectedness, academic…

The present study examined the extent to which parent involvement in education was directly and indirectly (via school engagement) related to academic outcomes in an effort to more fully understand the school experiences of urban adolescents. Participants (80% racial/ethnic minority; n = 108) were in grades 6, 7 or 8. In the Fall and subsequent…

Self-determination theory posits that satisfaction of the needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness represents the basic nutriments for humans' optimal functioning. It also postulates that with greater the degree to which these three needs are equally satisfied, the quality of motivation is further enhanced. Yet, this premise has remained…

Hands-on making (e.g., "Maker") has become prevalent in current educational settings. To understand the role that students' epistemic curiosity plays in hands-on making contests, this study explored its correlation to students' positive affect and continuance intention to participate in a hands-on making contest called…

The relationships that students have with their parents and peers permeate their lives both inside and outside of the classroom. The purpose of the present exploratory study is to assess (a) the psychometric quality of measures gauging the latent variables of adolescents' perceptions of their relatedness to both parents and peers and (b) the…

This study examined mother-adolescent conflict as a mediator of longitudinal reciprocal relations between adolescent aggression and depressive symptoms and maternal psychological control. Motivated by family systems theory and the transactions that occur between individual and dyadic levels of the family system, we examined the connections among…

Background: Peer victimization is associated with increased internalizing problems and reduced school adjustment. Research into the main effect and the buffering effect of social support on these internalizing problems has produced inconsistent findings, and none has tested the buffering effect of social support on school adjustment. Moreover,…

This study investigated the direct and indirect roles of morphological awareness reading comprehension for Spanish-speaking language minority learners reading in English. Multivariate path analysis was used to investigate the unique contribution of derivational morphological awareness to reading comprehension as well as its indirect contributions…

The relations between adolescents' habitual usage of media violence and their tendency to engage in aggressive and prosocial behavior in a school setting were examined in a cross-sectional study with 1688 7th and 8th graders in Germany who completed measures of violent media exposure and normative acceptance of aggression. For each participant,…

This study examined reciprocal associations among adolescents' negative feedback-seeking, depressive symptoms, perceptions of friendship quality, and peer-reported social preference over an 11-month period. A total of 478 adolescents in grades 6-8 completed measures of negative feedback-seeking, depressive symptoms, friendship quality,…