Adventure-based learning is used by behavioral health providers to connect clients to therapeutic activities outside traditional settings. These approaches often aim to build internal and external assets that support positive youth development. Here we evaluate the impact of an experiential learning curriculum on youth development and identify…

This longitudinal study of adolescents in the first year of secondary school, examined the relationship between psychological functioning at the beginning of year 7 (mean age 11.25 years) with attainment at the end of year 7 (mean age 11.78 years). Depressive symptoms, school liking and conduct problems predicted lower attainment across time…

Adolescents' expectations about the timing of adult role transitions have the potential to shape their actual transitions, setting the stage for their adult lives. Although expectations about timing emerge by early adolescence, little is known about how these expectations develop across adolescence. This longitudinal study examined developmental…

Previous studies with adults have shown that age has an important influence on laypeople's wisdom theories. However, children's and adolescents' understanding of the concept of wisdom has hardly been investigated. In the current study, 80 children and adolescents completed a questionnaire concerning an event where they had been wise and an event…

Establishing life purpose is a key developmental task; however, how it is linked to adolescents' everyday family, school, extracurricular, and leisure experiences remains unclear. Using daily diary data from 180 Asian American ninth and tenth graders (50% ninth; 58% female; 25% first generation), daily purpose was positively related to daily…

In this paper, we review findings from Project Competence on the nature of personality development from middle childhood through the early adult years and place these findings in the context of current research on temperament and personality traits. In a series of studies using data drawn from the Project Competence longitudinal project, we have…

Perceptions of parents and their adolescent children about a number of developmental tasks were compared for 508 Dutch families. Parents consistently indicated later ages for the achievement of developmental tasks than did adolescents, but they had similar views of the sequence in which achievement of developmental tasks should occur. (SLD)

A model project designed to improve adolescents' and pre-adolescents' attitudes toward themselves and toward school was implemented in the Cincinnati, Ohio Public Schools. Five major areas of affective development were identified as project goals: self concept, values and decision making, peer relationship, academic confidence, and…

This book reports the findings of a study of adolescent culture and language in eighth graders. The books consists of ten chapters including discussions of the following topics: (1) "Remember When?" a theoretical framework; (2) "Gender, Talk, and School Culture," an interpretive and a dialectic approach to the study of gender, talk, and…