A study was conducted to investigate (1) the relationship between mothers' and fathers' attitudes about education at the time of their children's kindergarten entry, and (2) the relationship between these parent attitudes and children's kindergarten adjustment. Subjects were drawn from the kindergarten rosters of four suburban elementary schools…

To determine whether support systems ameliorated the impact of divorce on family stress and child adjustment, the present study examined the availability to divorced families of various support systems, including the extended family, church, work, and community groups. Specifically, the study addressed the impact of parental support systems on…

This paper describes the development and operation of a high school orientation program using peer facilitators. The activities of the administrative team (two school social workers, a guidance counselor, and an assistant principal) are described, as is training of upper classmen to be peer facilitators for freshmen orientation. A brief…

Student transfers from school to school at the elementary and secondary levels have been increasing for many decades. A proposed typology of major school transfer flows distinguishes between "systemic" transfers, caused by changes in school structures, and "individualistic" transfers, caused by family or individual changes. Within this typology,…

To eight pictures of adolescents in the School Scene Apperception Questionnaire, adolescents note their agreement to statements which were derived from free responses by more than 600 adolescents having some difficulty in school. To establish the reactions of school-adjusted adolescents to the pictures, three semantic differential…

Defining environment as both the physical space and the people who are in it, this paper explored the effects of environment on a first-grade child. Urie Bronfenbrenner's theories on the effects of physical environment on children provided a conceptual foundation during the observation of Christy, a student at Lawrence School in Brookline,…

This study examined the relationship of the five-factor model of personality (extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and intellect) to college student adjustment. Using a sample of 200+ undergraduate students at a large public university, it was found that emotional stability correlated positively with goal…

This study examined the adjustment process of 727 students who transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in fall 1994 or fall 1995. The Transfer Students' Questionnaire (TSQ) was organized into three main sections: social demographics, perceptions of the community college experience, and perception of the UCLA experience. The…

This study of 68 scientifically gifted Korean high school students indicated that males and females are more similar than different on mental health profiles. Both sexes were relatively free of maladjustment, with males scoring higher on self-criticism than females. Self-concept was correlated with intelligence but not with achievement.…

Presents an investigation into situational characteristics and their relationship to factors affecting graduate students' judgments of the relevance of information; proposes new student orientation as an exercise in information retrieval; and explains a process model of socialization to meet new students' information needs. (Contains 14…

This study used a longitudinal qualitative approach to study children's acquisition of scripts for school learning in New Zealand. Participating in the study were four boys and four girls, 5 years of age. Children were observed in regular class activities in their first term in a new entrant classroom and 1 year later. Informal and semi-structured…

The University 101 course seeks to create an attitude among freshmen that helps them appreciate the value of higher education, to point the way to university resources that will allow them to develop to their fullest potential, and thereby to cause more of them to survive the freshman year. This study of first-term freshmen at Tennessee…

In recent years, there have been calls in many countries to ensure that children come to school "ready to learn." This study explored what is meant by this term by different groups of people and the ways in which the beliefs underpinning such a term influence decisions such as when children start school, the classes they enter, and…

Data from a recent study of potential effects of friends' characteristics and friendship features on students' adjustment to school are used to illustrate the distinction between two contradictory assumptions about the path of peer influence. The first assumption, which is linked to the work of Bronfenbrenner, takes a negative view, and focuses on…

The Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire (SACQ) is a self-report, Likert-type scale consisting of 67 statements that allude to various aspects of the experience of adjusting to college. The SACQ yields five indices: a full-scale score and subscale scores for each of four aspects of adjustment to college (academic adjustment, social…