To ascertain the incidence of drug use in a rural area and to provide insight into the covariates of illegal drug use which might be useful in developing prevention programs, data were collected in the spring of 1981 from 2,060 or 83.2% of all students grades 8 through 12 in a southern Georgia county. Data were collected during regularly scheduled…

In order to assess children's perceived vulnerability to health problems, a longitudinal study was designed to observe third and seventh graders at five intervals over a 2-year period. The hypotheses tested concerned relationships between perceived vulnerability to health problems and age, sex, and socioeconomic status. Data were obtained from a…

Until recently, older workers have not been recognized as a group requiring special attention in the area of fair employment practices. Thus, progress has been slow towards the development of valid and reliable indices of performance which are applicable across the life span. Research shows that many measures of employee evaluation provide no…

The cognitive determinants of number analogy performance were studied by systematically manipulating the processing demands imposed by the items. To explore sources of developmental differences in analogical reasoning, subjects were included from two age levels, grades 4 and 5 and college. To allow the investigation of individual differences in…

This paper argues that (1) as measures of emotional empathy in children are refined, there is increasingly strong support for the hypothesis that emotional empathy can serve both as an inhibitor of antisocial behavior and as a motivator of prosocial behavior, but that (2) since the relation between children's empathy and their behavior is…

Developmental changes in self-perceptions were studied in children and adolescents in grades 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12. The responses of subjects to the question Who am I? were analyzed by means of a 30-category scoring system. Children described themselves in terms of their physical appearance and their behavior, while adolescents referred to their…

The purpose of this longitudinal study was to describe kindergarten children's abilities, evaluate the effect of teacher expectations on kindergarten performance, and explore the predictive validity of kindergarten performance for later reading ability. An original sample of approximately 450 kindergarten children was tested with a school…

Motivational beliefs of children in grades 5 through 8 (ages 10 years, 9 months to 13 years, 7 months) were assessed in a cross-sectional and a longitudinal study. Children attended a nonsectarian, private school in which the method of evaluating academic performance changed over grades from an individualized, mastery-oriented approach to a…

This study determined preservice teachers' perceptions about the characteristics of effective teachers and investigated factors (e.g., gender, ethnicity, age, year of study, area of specialization, and parental status) that may have influenced their responses. Participants were 219 students attending a large mid-Southern university. The students…

This paper examines changes in American higher education, using the metaphor of ocean tides. The tides of change in the 1980s included public demands for assessment and accountability; fairness and credibility in advantages and benefits; improved quality of education; effectiveness and efficiency; assurance that college graduates were personally…

Reports the results of a survey in Adelaide (Australia) concerning public attitudes toward language diversity and the need to teach English and/or second languages to children in the schools. The survey analyzed responses on the basis of respondent's occupation, sex, income, and age, and found a high degree of support for language diversity. (MSE)

Discusses the Swedish family support system and presents the results of a study of the intellectual and socioemotional development of 110 Swedish children from early childhood through age 16. Found that socioeconomic background and the age when they first entered public day care had a significant influence on the subjects' intellectual and…

Results of a Hong Kong survey, described in an earlier report, are summarized here. The study investigated the English vocabulary size of native-speaking adults (n=78), non-English native-speaking adults--Chinese (n=20), and non-English native Chinese-Speaking non-Chinese (n=9). The vocabulary used reflected British rather than American English…

At Thomas Nelson Community College (TNCC), Hampton (Virginia), a study of transfer success was conducted in conjunction with Christopher Newport University (CNU), the primary transfer destination of the community college's students. Detailed records were examined for over 1,800 students in an attempt to identify several statistically significant…

This study focused on how school-age children develop and refine their strategies for dealing with aversive emotions, defined as fear, shame, anger, sadness, and hurt feelings. Two groups of children were used, one from a public school, serving a working class neighborhood, and the other from a sexual abuse treatment agency. The aversive emotions…