To investigate how adolescents interpret ambiguous actions in hypothetical interracial peer encounters, we conducted a study in which 8th- and 11th-grade students (N = 837) evaluated 4 interracial peer encounters in which the intentions of the protagonist were ambiguous. The sample was evenly divided by gender and included both African American…

Feminist psychologists have long posited that relationship authenticity (i.e., the congruence between what one thinks and feels and what one does and says in relational contexts) is integral to self-esteem and well-being. Guided by a feminist developmental framework, the authors investigated the role of relationship authenticity in promoting…

The theoretical and policy focus on parental involvement in education has evolved into a consideration of 2-way connections between families and schools. Working from a social capital perspective emphasizing the importance of information in periods and domains of uncertainty, the author tested a specific application of this reconceptualization in…

The Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm was used to investigate developmental trends in accurate and false memory production. In Experiment 1, DRM lists adjusted to be more consistent with children's vocabulary were used with 2nd graders, 8th graders, and college students. Accurate and false recall and recognition increased with age, but…

The authors examined relationships among racial identity, school-based racial discrimination experiences, and academic engagement outcomes for adolescent boys and girls in Grades 8 and 11 (n = 204 boys and n = 206 girls). The authors found gender differences in peer and classroom discrimination and in the impact of earlier and later discrimination…

This investigation addresses the mediational role of friends' characteristics between adolescents' activity breadth (i.e., variety in activity participation) and their later adjustment. Data were drawn from 2 longitudinal studies: the Childhood and Beyond (CAB; N = 925) study and the Maryland Adolescent Development in Context Study (MADICS; N =…

This study assessed the relation between religious involvement and multiple indices of competence in 183 eighth- and ninth-grade Indonesian Muslim adolescents (M = 13.3 years). The authors assessed spirituality and religiosity using both parent and adolescent reports, and social competence and adjustment using multiple measures and data sources.…

The authors applied linear dynamic models to longitudinal data to examine the dynamics of reading and cognition from 1st to 12th grade. They used longitudinal data (N=445) from the Connecticut Longitudinal Study (S. E. Shaywitz, B. A. Shaywitz, J. M. Fletcher, & M. D. Escobar, 1990) to map the dynamic interrelations of various scales of the…

Similarity in early adolescent friends' general aggressiveness is well known, but questions remain regarding the degree to which friends aggress against the same victims. The authors examined this by administering the newly created Dyadic Aggression and Victimization Inventory to 417 sixth- through eighth-grade boys and girls (53%). Friends …

This article describes both normative changes and individual differences in the gender composition of girls' and boys' friendship networks across adolescence and predicts variations in these changes. It also examines changes in the characteristics (context, age difference, closeness, and support) of same- and other-sex friendships in the network.…

Two studies examine the stability of existing friendships and the formation of new friendships during a school year, for children in Grades 1, 4, and 8. Most friendships present in the fall of the school year remained constant in the spring. The formation of new friendships varied consistently with age. (Author/NH)

These results suggest that, for the purpose of measuring children's incidental learning, materials with integrated components such as color and shape are functionally different from stimuli with spatially independent components. (Authors)

Fourth-, sixth-, and eighth-grade children were tested with different methodologies for deriving measures of their knowledge of interlandmark distances and directions on their school campus. Overall results emphasized that measures derived from children's estimates of direction information were not comparable with measures derived from their…

Previously tested 5th and 6th graders in the two-year follow-up sample continued to respond associatively on the Children's Associative Responding Test, indicating stability in response patterns. Test-retest reliability of the number of errors was high. (Author/WY)

It has been suggested that overscheduling of upper-class youth might underlie the high distress and substance use documented among them. This assumption was tested by considering suburban 8th graders' involvement in different activities along with their perceptions of parental attitudes toward achievement. Results indicated negligible evidence for…