Black and brown people are being murdered by police officers at an alarming rate, and nothing is being done about it.

This research explored the career beliefs of inner-city adolescents (N = 97). Results identified six types of beliefs: success is related to effort, job satisfaction, work interest and liking, flexibility/adaptability, achievement and persistence, and toleration of uncertainty. A majority of these young people believed that their success was not…

Aggressive and weapons carrying behaviors are indicative of youth violence. The theory of planned behavior is used in the current analysis to improve our understanding of violence-related behaviors. We examine the influence of perceived behavioral control (self-control and decision making) as a part of the overall framework for understanding the…

Recent evidence suggests that the neighborhood context, particularly for urban youth, can influence a range of outcomes. This study makes contributions to the field by examining how the neighborhood context directly relates to missing school. To do so, this study employs a large-scale, longitudinal data set of multilevel observations for entire…

This article describes a pen pal project that took place between preservice teachers and students in an urban middle school. The purpose of this project was twofold: to expose preservice teachers to the rewards of urban teaching and to expose urban middle school students to adult reading role models. As a result of the project, both goals were…

This article discusses the viability of reading culturally relevant literature aloud to urban middle school youth. The findings from a research study are shared and guidelines for implementing a culturally sensitive read aloud program in your own middle school or high school classroom are discussed. Anecdotes from students involved in the study…

The authors identified trajectories of teacher-child relationship conflict and closeness from Grades 1 to 6, and associations between these trajectories and externalizing and internalizing behaviors at 11 years old among low-income, urban boys (N = 262). There were three main findings. Nagin cluster analyses indicated five trajectories for…

Considerable evidence shows the detriments of neighborhood social disorganization for urban youth. Researchers have focused less on potential neighborhood strengths or on the interplay of neighborhood perceptions and objective neighborhood characteristics. The authors examined the presence and perception of positive and negative neighborhood…

Background: Insufficient physical activity among urban youth increases risk of chronic disease.Purpose:This study assessed reported physical activity to determine when disparities in participation emerge and what ecologically guided factors are linked with high activity. Methods:We administered a cross-sectional survey to a diverse sample of 321…

This study explored relations between culturally relevant stressors (i.e., urban hassles, perceived discrimination) and subjective well-being (SWB; i.e., positive/ negative affect, life satisfaction) to examine whether ethnic identity and/or coping strategies would serve as moderators of the relations between stress and SWB for 157 urban, ethnic…

The present case study investigated the impact of a short-term summer literacy approach on writing performance and self-perception of writing for young adolescents of low-income families residing in urban housing projects. The approach offered intensive literacy engagement to offset summer achievement loss; assisted ethnic-minority, low…

This study is based on a 2-year evaluation of the Pathways Partnership, a precollege preparation program involving one school district, multiple colleges and universities, and several major businesses in a Midwestern metropolitan area. The week-long summer program cultivates youth leadership and the exploration of higher education through various…

An ethnographic study of youth creating media was conducted to examine new literacies at an urban high school in northern California. The school primarily served students from low-income, non-dominant racial and ethnic backgrounds. This article reports on a 9th-grade social studies multimedia project about migration and immigration--called…

Background: School-based social-emotional and character development (SECD) programs can influence not only SECD but also academic-related outcomes. This study evaluated the impact of one SECD program, Positive Action (PA), on educational outcomes among low-income, urban youth. Methods: The longitudinal study used a matched-pair, cluster-randomized…

Using new literacies critically can be an excellent pedagogy for motivating and empowering students who feel alienated from their school and society. This article describes how one middle school teacher engaged his inner-city English language learners with critical media literacy as a way of making their learning more meaningful and motivating.…