A healthy family climate, including parents' attitudes towards their children and the quality of sibling relationships, is essential for child resilience. One of the domains where parental attitudes are determinative is the children's academic life. In an unhealthy family climate, for instance, parental pressure for academic success may cause…

In this study, I investigated Grade 4 and 5 students' emotions while they engaged in the exploration of unsolved mathematics problems, including parts of the Graceful Tree Conjecture. Ten students from an after-school program in the Midwest participated in seven task-based interviews. The students exhibited a variety of emotions throughout the…

This study examined the interactive role of empathic disposition and affective perspective-taking ability (APT) in children's machiavellianism, prosocial behavior, and motive for helping. Children demonstrating low empathy and high APT were expected to be highly machiavellian and to cite self-oriented reasons for helping more frequently than would…

This paper reports on a study of situational influences of affect and goal value on social problem-solving in middle childhood. It was expected that the adequacy of any particular social problem-solving process would be reduced by increases in goal intensity. On the basis of prior testing, two social goals of high value and two of low value were…

This study introduces a novel methodology for examining affective experiences in the classroom. The general procedure is to make auditory and visual recordings of a particular child during a normal classroom period. That child is then immediately taken from the class and placed in a private room where the recordings are replayed. The student is…

Research is reviewed on high success (low error rate) during instructional tasks in relationship to learning outcomes; alternative interpretations of the relationship are considered; and alternative strategies for controlling success during remedial reading instructional tasks are discussed. A simple procedure is described for the analysis of…

The relationship of perceived and actual sociometric status to outcome variables in academic, behavioral, psychological, and physical health adjustment domains among elementary school children was examined. Participants were 180 first, third, and fifth grade public school children, their parents, and teachers. Sociometric status was assessed with…

Whether there were differences in motivational and learning environment perceptions of students selected based on their performance on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) was studied over 3 years in a public school district in Texas. The degree to which affective elements of student behavior varied according to their success on this…

A study extended a previous study (Sparks and Spirek, 1988) by examining children's individual differences in coping with stressful mass media. The investigation proposed that scores on the Children's Coping Measure (CCM) are related to the intensity of negative affect children experience while watching a frightening program. Eighty-two fifth and…

The effects of student socioeconomic status (SES) and four teacher behaviors--teacher structure, teacher affect, cognitive level of questions, and group size--on student reading achievement were analyzed. Subjects were 36 fifth and sixth grade classroom teachers and their 820 students. Data were collected with the Reading Comprehension Subtest…