This book is a study of the impact that changes in living environments (i.e. from homelessness in a shelter to a family's own dwelling unit) have on the academic achievement of school-age children. The study samples seven cases of public school children in grades 5 through 8 during the years 1988 to 1991. The children lived in the same shelter and…

This study of six urban children ages 8-12 years challenges the prevailing misconception that poor city children are troubled, passive, and unintelligent. The research involved interviewing children about how and what they played and having them discuss drawings that they made about play. Guided by these children, who live in New York's East…

The development of sex stereotype knowledge (SSK) was studied using 120, 120, and 204 Portuguese children aged 5, 8, and 11 years, respectively. SSK increased with age and socioeconomic status. Results are compared with findings from Brazil, Latin America, and a 24-country study by D. Best and others (1977). (SLD)

This study was conducted to provide information on environmental knowledge of fifth and sixth graders in a Greek city in order to allow effective planning of environmental education. Results indicate that children's knowledge about the environment is influenced by their immediate experience as well as by textbook content. Discusses implications of…

The present study used general growth mixture modeling to identify pathways of antisocial behavior development within an epidemiological sample of urban, primarily African American boys. Teacher-rated aggression, measured longitudinally from 1st to 7th grade, was used to define growth trajectories. Three high-risk trajectories (chronic high,…

The Erikson Psychosocial Inventory (EPSI) (Rosenthal, Gurney, and Moore, 1981) was introduced into a longitudinal study of 234 previously studied inner-city children as they were scheduled to make the transition from elementary to junior high school. Compared to the EPSI original Australian sample, inner-city African American 12- and 13-year-olds…

In behavioral science research, language has been increasingly seen to reflect the concepts that the child has acquired prior to, and hence independent of, the acquisition of language. Analyses based on this idea are confined largely to words that denote clear perceptual referents. Language, however, contains many terms that have no portrayable…

The research reported in this paper has three major purposes: to assess the development of racial attitudes in urban children, to evaluate the effects of race of examiner on children's expressed attitudes, and to examine some of the perceptual correlates of racial attitudes. It was predicted that older children would perceive faces of another race…

An attempt was made to distinguish between capacity and motivational interpretations of individual differences in children's creativity. Creativity tasks required the child to name as many ideas as he could that met a simple problem requirement. Tasks were given under "base line" conditions and with a reward of one cent for each idea given. If…

Because speech sound discrimination tests can be contaminated by a particular kind of "response set," i.e., the tendency not to respond to the final parts of words as effective stimuli, children can be mistakenly diagnosed as having very poor speech-sound discrimination. About 20 percent of urban lower-class children have this response…

Reasons for the disproportionate failure rate of young urban African American males were studied in an ethnographic study of third- and sixth-grade classrooms in a low-income African American community. The multimethod approach involved observing classroom sessions and school activities, interviewing students and teachers, and examining…

Examines the relative contribution of measures of objective and subjective neighborhood danger and measures of social support from neighbors, teachers, parents, and friends. Findings suggest that adolescents' adaptation is influenced more by the availability of social support, especially from parents, than from their reports and perceptions of…

This special issue summarizes parallel studies in five countries (Japan, Greece, Thailand, Republic of China, United States) investigating the causal linkages among socioeconomic status variables, family processes, and school variables on the mathematics achievement of urban elementary school children. Methodological problems in cross-cultural and…

The understandings of and interest in the environment of children in an inner-city black community were studied. To investigate their environmental moral reasoning, children's evaluations and supporting justifications were assessed regarding a hypothetical scenario that involved polluting a local waterway. Seventy-two children, 12 males and 12…

While it is important to improve the outcomes of bilingual and English-only reading instruction for English language learners at all grade levels, there is a particular need to see that students are successful in beginning to read in the early elementary grades. One program that has achieved a great deal of success in meeting this goal is called…