Adolescent suicide is a critical problem in the United States. Identification and reporting of warning signs is a suicide prevention practice that is particularly important in schools, where adolescents spend the majority of their time. Though it is necessary to consider both risk factors and warning signs when evaluating an individual's suicide…

Critical literacy is an appropriate learning outcome for social studies courses because it has the potential to teach students how to critically evaluate sources of information relevant to historical texts and current news media. The purpose of this qualitative case study is to examine the process through which students learned to apply critical…

Guided by the life course perspective, this study investigated the developmental antecedents of contact, closeness/warmth, and negativity in young adults' relationships with their parents. Taking the developmental systems approach, we considered interindividual differences in not only initial levels of parenting quality in early adolescence (Grade…

Background: The Pennsylvania Youth Survey (PAYS) is administered biennially to adolescents; it covers knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors about risk and protective factors. Purpose: This study explored 8th, 10th, and 12th grade students' attitudes and beliefs about current trends regarding drugs, alcohol, and mental health. Methods: We asked…

The purpose of the present study was to determine the role of emotion regulation in the pathway to problematic alcohol use among adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), specifically investigating the total effect of emotion regulation on problematic alcohol use and the indirect effect of emotion regulation through social…

The COVID-19 virus brought on a public health emergency that massively disrupted school systems and learning nationwide. During the 2020-2021 school year, many local education agencies (LEAs) in Pennsylvania and other states adopted remote learning to help slow the virus's spread. However, remote learning came with challenges for students,…

This study examines developmental change across adolescence in the similarity of friends versus nonfriends. This differential in similarity is a key aspect of the organization of the peer context of development: The stronger the correlation between friends for an attribute, the more the attribute delineates clustering and divisions of friendships.…

In this qualitative comparative case study, we drew from institutional theory and cultural historical activity theory to explore how educators wrote, used, and conceptualized the role of Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) for students with specific learning disabilities within secondary inclusive settings. We found that students' IEPs were…

Media literacy interventions offer promising avenues for the prevention of risky health behaviors among children and adolescents, but current literature remains largely equivocal about their efficacy. The primary objective of this study was to develop and test theoretically-grounded measures of audiences' degree of engagement with the content of…

This study describes the process of defining a hypothetical learning progression (LP) for astronomy around the big idea of "Solar System formation." At the most sophisticated level, students can explain how the formation process led to the current Solar System by considering how the planets formed from the collapse of a rotating cloud of…

In many domains, problem solving involves the application of general domain principles to specific problem representations. In 3 classroom studies with an intelligent tutoring system, we examined the impact of (learner-generated) interactions and (tutor-provided) visual cues designed to facilitate rule-diagram mapping (where students connect…

Recent research has suggested that differences between intelligent tutor lessons predict a large amount of the variance in the prevalence of gaming the system. Within this paper, we investigate whether such differences also predict how much students choose to go off-task, and if so, which differences predict how much off-task behavior will occur.…

The Applied Biological and Agribusiness Interest Inventory was revised to reflect seven agricultural career clusters and to measure agricultural interest of eighth-grade students. A study conducted in Pennsylvania tested the interests of 8th-grade students and then developed scoring keys using 10th-grade students as the basis for the key. The…

Study objectives were to assess actual changes in normative traditionalism which had occurred in a sample of rural Pennsylvania areas and to determine the extent to which the changes in traditionalism were associated with the rurality of these areas. Utilizing a combination of socioeconomic data (census derived) and longitudinal data obtained via…