Attachment theorists suggest that attachment security with parents supports the quality of social adaptation in peer groups during early childhood, and numerous studies supporting this conjecture have been published. Most of these studies used enacted representations rather than mental representations of attachment security, and most studies…

This study tested assumptions and conclusions reached in an earlier confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) study of the social competence (SC) construct for preschool children. Two samples (total N = 408; a new Portuguese sample and one from US samples that had participated in the original study) contributed data. Seven SC indicators were tested for…

A detailed description and sociological analysis were made of peer interaction in a public school kindergarten located in a large urban school district. Data collected over a 5-month observation period included field note transcriptions of hundreds of interaction events, records of formal and informal interviews with classroom participants, and…

When students enter the classroom they are confronted with a wide variety of goals to strive for, activities to engage in, and challenges to face, across a number of domains: academic, artistic, sporting and social. Recently, there has been a growing recognition of this complexity of goals among researchers interested in student's motivational…