Monitoring the Future (MTF) has become one of the nation's most relied upon scientific sources of valid information on trends in use of licit and illicit psychoactive drugs by U.S. adolescents, college students, young adults, and adults up to age 60. During the last four decades, the study has tracked and reported on the use of an ever-growing…

Chemical equilibrium is so important domain knowledge in chemistry that the corresponding organisation of concepts in students has been an interesting but unsolved issue. A deeper understanding of how students organise the relevant concepts in long-term memory is beneficial to develop more targeted teaching practices. This research utilized the…

Monitoring the Future (MTF) is a long term study of substance use and related factors among U.S. adolescents, college students, and adult high school graduates through age 60. It is conducted annually and supported by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. MTF findings identify emerging substance use problems, track substance use trends, are…

In this paper I describe and analyse how critical pedagogy, an approach to teaching and learning that encourages students to reflect on their socio-political contexts, may stimulate critical consciousness and dialogue at a youth radio show. The participants, who attended four diverse Cape Town high schools and predominantly lived in poor…

An empirical study on 12th-grade students' engagement on a global warming debate as a citizens' conference is reported. Within the design-based research methodology, an interdisciplinary teaching sequence integrating an initiation to non-violent communication was developed. Students' debates were analyzed according to three dimensions:…

This article explores the relationship between students' ethnic identities and their ascriptions of historical significance to moments in Canada's past. Twenty-six grade 12 students living in an ethnically diverse urban centre in British Columbia, Canada participated. Phenomenographic research methods were followed, with a range of data informing…

Monitoring the Future (MTF) is a long-term study of American adolescents, college students, and adults through age 50. It has been conducted annually by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research since its inception in 1975 and is supported under a series of investigator-initiated, competing research grants from the National…

Background/Context: A main objective of the Equality of Educational Opportunity Survey (EEOS), conducted in 1965, was to document the lack of availability of equal educational opportunities for minority students in public schools. Another equally important objective was to reveal specific inequalities in facilities and resources available to…

The purpose of this research project was to use an experimental design research methodology to compare learning and attitudinal effects of two different design instructional strategies on randomly selected and assigned 11th and 12th grade students. Through the use of a common technological based problem, students were guided through a design…

Background: Small schools have been promoted as an educational reform that is capable of improving student outcomes. However, a survey of the research on small schools indicates that much of the movement for decreasing school size is based primarily on correlational methods that do not control for selection effects in the data. In addition,…

Now in its 35th year, Monitoring the Future (MTF) is a long-term program of research conducted at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research under a series of investigator-initiated research grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The study is comprised of several ongoing series of annual surveys of nationally…

The Monitoring the Future (MTF) study is an ongoing series of national surveys of American adolescents and adults that has provided the nation with a vital window into the important, but largely hidden, problem behaviors of illegal drug use, alcohol use, tobacco use, anabolic steroid use, and psychotherapeutic drug use. For more than a third of a…

The present study is a multi-phased, mixed methodological investigation of teacher interest. In Phase 1, 12th grade students nominated and quantitatively evaluated teachers who were perceived as helping them learn and become interested in a high school core subject. Exploratory factor analysis revealed that student perceptions of teacher interest…

Differences between students with and without written parental consent to take part in a sensitive health survey were studied for 2,705 9th and 12th graders with active consent and 3,533 with only passive consent who took a less sensitive survey. Implications of differences are discussed. (SLD)

Among 492 rural Ohio high school students surveyed in 1979, 78.3% had used alcohol at least once and 51.3% had used marijuana at least once, contrasting previous research reporting low substance use among rural youth. Socio-demographic and family variables had only limited utility for understanding drug or alcohol abuse. (SB)