Smartphones are the principal instrument for internet access among adolescents and pre-adolescents in many industrialized countries. However, research on the long-term correlates of age at first access to these devices concerning life outcomes is scarce. This study contributes to the literature by collecting data from 3,247 Italian students in…

Cognitive self-regulation is regarded as necessary for enhancing academic success and the possibility of lifelong learning. This study, based on 263,683 Italian 10th-grade students, examines the use of self-regulated cognitive strategies in immigrant and native students, as well as in boys and girls. Preliminarily, we examined the psychometric…

Online exchange of sexual content ("sexting") is associated with potentially negative consequences, especially for girls. We investigated possible associations between family functioning and girls' sexting. Italian teenage girls (N = 250; M[subscript age] = 16.36 years; SD[subscript age] = 1.88) completed online surveys that evaluated…

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) Research for Education series represents a further effort by IEA to capitalize on it's unique datasets, so as to provide powerful information for policymakers and researchers. Each report focuses on a specific topic and is produced by a dedicated team of leading…

I explored the effect of socio-economic status (SES) on mathematics achievement by gender at grades 5 in 2012 and 10 in 2017. Secondary Italian data (30,868 pupils in primary and 38,091 in secondary school) were analysed via the Rasch model to estimate students' ability in mathematics and then via a three-level regression (students nested into…

Principals (policy makers) have debated the progress in U.S. student performance for a half century or more. Informing these conversations, survey agents have administered seven million psychometrically linked tests in math and reading in 160 waves to national probability samples of selected cohorts born between 1954 and 2007. This study is the…

Time attitudes (TA) are evaluative feelings toward the past, present and future. Given the role of TA in psychological and behavioral outcomes, the aim of this study was to analyze the adequacy of the Adolescent Time Inventory-Time Attitudes (ATI-TA) scale among adolescents and young adults in Italy. The scale was administered to 638 students in…

Judgments about objects in the world are often based on probabilistic information (or cues). A frugal judgment strategy that utilizes memory (i.e., the ability to discriminate between known and unknown objects) as a cue for inference is the recognition heuristic (RH). The usefulness of the RH depends on the structure of the environment,…

Using retrospective self-reporting, rates of illegal and legal performance-enhancing substance (PES) use in the past three months among more than 3,400 Italian high school adolescents were obtained and estimated. The study focused on the extent to which these sociodemographic characteristics and illegal PES use were associated with adolescents'…

Recent results of international assessment programs (e.g., PISA) have shown a large difference in high school students' performance between northern and southern Italy. On this basis, it has been argued that the discrepancy reflects differences in average intelligence of the inhabitants of regions and is associated with genetic factors ( and ).…

Associations among dating, sexual activity, gender, and adjustment were investigated in 2,273 Italian adolescents (54% female, ages 14 to 19 years) attending public high schools. After controlling for age and type of school attended, both being in a dating relationship and being male were associated with less alienation, more positive views of the…

In a cross-national replication and extension of prior research with American students, Italian middle and high school students completed measures of interests and competency beliefs relative to a variety of school- and nonschool-related activities. Both interests and competency beliefs tended to show greater adherence to circumplex Realistic,…