This 1-year longitudinal study examined the effects of academic performance and depression in friendships among elementary school children in China. Participants included 1122 children (44% boys) within 561 stable friendship dyads initially in fourth and fifth grades (initial M[subscript age] = 11 years). Data on academic performance, depression,…

Previous research on the role of prior skills like proportional reasoning skills for the development of mathematical concepts offers conclusions such as "more (prior skills) is better (for later learning)." Insights, which prior skill "level" goes along with which "level" of learning outcomes, may advance the…

Three hundred and ninety-one children (195 girls; M[subscript age] = 9.56 years) attending Grades 1 and 5 completed implicit and explicit measures of math attitudes and math self-concepts. Math grades were obtained. Multilevel analyses showed that first-grade girls held a strong negative implicit attitude about math, despite no gender differences…

The "Developing Inclusive Youth" program is a classroom-based, individually administered video tool that depicts peer-based social and racial exclusion, combined with teacher-led discussions. A multisite randomized control trial was implemented with 983 participants (502 females; 58.5% White, 41.5% Ethnic/racial minority; M[subscript…

The purpose of this longitudinal study was to examine the influence of spoken dialect density on writing and on the codevelopment of reading and writing in African American English-speaking (AAE) children from first through fifth grades. The sample included 869 students, ranging in age from 5.8 to 12.5 years. Results indicated that dialect density…

Nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Class of 2011 (n = 14,370) were used to examine the grade-level and cumulative outcomes of school absenteeism between kindergarten and fifth grade for students' school performance in the United States. Students who were more frequently absent in any year of…

This study examines associations between leisure reading and reading skills in data of 2,525 students followed from age 7 to 16. As a step further from traditional cross-lagged analysis, a random intercept cross-lagged panel model was used to identify within-person associations of leisure reading (books, magazines, newspapers, and digital…

Theory suggests that African American students benefit from warm and demanding teachers. This study examines the relation between students' perceptions of 634 teachers' warm demander characteristics and achievement growth in fourth and fifth grades (M[subscript student age] = 9-11.5 years). Analyses explored whether relations were moderated by the…

This research examined the process and conditions of social projection of biased ethnic attitudes to classmates in two samples of Grades 4-6 children (n = 342, M[subscript age] = 10.75, SD = 0.98; 49% girls; and n = 525, M[subscript age] = 10.49 years, SD = 0.96; 51% girls). Children reported on the ethnic group norm in their classroom and on…

The epistemic trust literature emphasizes that children's evaluations of informants' trustworthiness affects learning, but there is no evidence that epistemic trust affects learning in academic domains. The current study investigated how reliability affects decimal learning. Fourth and fifth graders (N = 122; M[subscript age] = 10.1 years)…

Positive youth development (PYD) deserves more empirical attention, particularly among children of diverse racial-ethnic backgrounds. Given the need among families for monitoring and supervision during out-of-school time, community-based afterschool is a potentially promotive ecological setting. This study explores the quality of afterschool…

The development of scientific thinking was assessed in 1,581 second, third, and fourth graders (8-, 9-, 10-year-olds) based on a conceptual model that posits developmental progression from naïve to more advanced conceptions. Using a 66-item scale, five components of scientific thinking were addressed, including experimental design, data…

This study examined how peer relationships (i.e., sociometric and perceived popularity) and teacher--child relationships (i.e., support and conflict) impact one another throughout late childhood. The sample included 586 children (46% boys), followed annually from Grades 4 to 6 (Mage.wave1 = 9.26 years). Autoregressive cross-lagged modeling was…

This study examined reciprocal contributions between shyness-sensitivity and social, school, and psychological adjustment in urban Chinese children. Longitudinal data were collected once a year from Grade 3 to Grade 6 (ages 9-12 years) for 1,171 children from multiple sources. Shyness-sensitivity positively contributed to social, school, and…

Children and adolescents evaluated group inclusion and exclusion in the context of generic and group-specific norms involving morality and social conventions. Participants ("N" = 381), aged 9.5 and 13.5 years, judged an in-group member's decision to deviate from the norms of the group, whom to include, and whether their personal…