In recent years, there has been heightened awareness of the importance of early childhood education and high school as intervention points in the educational lives of America's children. Less attention has been paid to the importance of the upper elementary grades and middle school and the role they must play in the preparation of students for…

Objectives: To determine relationships between physical fitness and academic achievement in diverse, urban public school children. Methods: This cross-sectional study used public school data from 2004 to 2005. Academic achievement was assessed as a passing score on Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) achievement tests in…

This study has pedagogical implications in view of rapidly growing technological development and widespread use of the Internet in instruction. The spread of online homework sites with highly commercial aims has opened a new research area regarding the structure, aim and the significant role of homework in education. Particularly, the changes in…

A growing body of research indicates that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students are often unsafe at school. Little research has examined school safety for students with LGBT parents. We examined adolescents' perceptions of school safety for students with LGBT parents using data from a survey of 2,302 California sixth through…

The use of illicit and licit drugs continues to be a major public health concern. Many prevention and drug education programs address this issue by attempting to enhance self-esteem. The idea is that increased levels of self-esteem will serve as a protective factor in decreasing the motivation and increasing the resistance to use drugs. This study…

Monitoring the Future (MTF), now in its 35th year, has become one of the nation's most relied-upon sources of information on changes taking place in licit and illicit psychoactive drug use among American adolescents, college students, young adults, and more recently, middle-aged adults. During the last three and a half decades, the study has…

This occasional paper serves as a supplement to one of four annual monographs from the Monitoring the Future (MTF) study, written by the study's investigators and published by the study's sponsor, the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The full 2009 survey results are reported in "Monitoring the Future National Survey Results on Drug Use,…

The purpose of this study was to determine middle school students' attitudes toward physical education using an attitude instrument grounded in attitude theory. In addition, this investigation also sought to ascertain if gender and grade level influence student attitudes toward the subject matter. Participants for this study were 995 students from…

Mass media interventions are among the strategies recommended for youth cigarette smoking prevention, but little is known about optimal methods for reaching diverse youth audiences. Grades 4 through 12 samples of youth from four states (n = 1,230) rated smoking-prevention messages in classroom settings. Similar proportions of African American,…

There are several avenues of inquiry that seek to understand and ameliorate the problem of bullying in schools, including the strategy of fostering respect. To date, however, there is little empirical literature testing the presumed relationship between respect and bullying. This study examined this relationship with surveys (N = 3,147) and…

This publication contains a sample of the indicators in "The Condition of Education 2009." The indicators include: (1) Enrollment Trends by Age; (2) Reading Performance and Achievement Gaps; (3) Mathematics Performance and Achievement Gaps; (4) Reading and Mathematics Score Trends; (5) Annual Earnings of Young Adults; (6) Public High…

This study tested the hypothesis whether older dyslexic children may obtain fewer gains on fluency and accuracy with respect to their younger peers after specific remediation. Changes in accuracy and fluency of a group of children with a diagnosis of dyslexia attending third and fourth grades were compared with those obtained by a group of…

Data from a population-based repository in Manitoba showed that students who are male, young for grade, and in Grades 1, 2, 7, and 8 were the most likely to be retained. After controlling for key student factors including socioeconomic status, school changes, and key school characteristics including stability of the student body, retention was a…

This article describes both normative changes and individual differences in the gender composition of girls' and boys' friendship networks across adolescence and predicts variations in these changes. It also examines changes in the characteristics (context, age difference, closeness, and support) of same- and other-sex friendships in the network.…

The Learning How to Learn (LHTL) Projects study of learning was comprehensive in attempting to explore learning practices from several different perspectives. This paper reports one of these explorations: into the beliefs and attitudes of pupils. This was carried out using questionnaires composed of questions exploring beliefs about, and attitudes…