Results of a study of 23 7th-grade students revealed that underachievers are less self-confident, less socially and emotionally mature, less able to focus on one concern at a time, less accurate in their perceptions about themselves and their work, and less hardworking than achievers. (IAH)

Sex equity issues which are emphasized in this article include: (a) how boys and girls negotiate reproductive transitions; (b) how male and female sexual maturity is treated differently by parents, educators, and society; and (c) how the consequences of puberty and sexual behavior may differ for boys and girls. (IAH)

The Growing Up FAST program involves working with adolescents and their parents and includes rites of passage, multicultural issues, and a solution-focused perspective. Discusses the program's development and theoretical background, as well as its specific goals, current valuative efforts, and implementation strategies. (RJM)

Performance on measures of phonology, reading, and spelling was evaluated for subjects (including 20 preschoolers, 23 grade school children, 17 adolescents, and 17 adults). Subjects had a history of a preschool phonology disorder. Although relative performance improved across age groups, at each age group subjects performed more poorly than…

Addresses event-related factors and cognitive-related factors as identifiers of the end of adolescence and the onset of adulthood. Adolescents were surveyed to determine what they believed were the most important attributes for becoming adults, and at what age their adulthood began. The majority of the sample identified cognitive factors as…

Background: The frequently reported decline in the "overall" frequency and intensity of fears during late childhood and adolescence may mask different developmental patterns for two broad subclasses of fears: fears concerning physical danger and fears concerning social evaluation. It was investigated if physical fears decrease between…

Advanced Placement allows a student to apply credits he has acquired in high school to waive basic academic college requirements. It has broad appeal, and by 2003 a million American students were participating. William Casement argues that, despite its popularity, the decreasing selectivity of the program, the immaturity of the high school…

As increasing numbers of mature students enter schools of social work, it is a challenge and an obligation for field instructors to discover ways to recruit and sustain them in the educational endeavor. Building upon three theoretical perspectives--Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed, Knowles's andragogy, and Schon's reflective learning and…

In this article the author looks at the image of journey and its archeform, quest, and finds two spiritual concepts: that of movement to the center followed by a return, and the concomitant understanding that all that has arisen and reached maturity must return to renew itself. Four journeys, the shamanic journey of soul, the hero's journey of…

This study ascertained the relationship between language maturity and mode of aggressive expression. More than 100 second and third grade children from Tallahasee, Florida schools took an apperceptive aggressive test to determine aggressive modality and then completed a portion of the Paradigmatic-Syntagmatic Language List to assess language…

Children over two standard deviations below height expectations have been described by researchers as being behaviorally immature and shown to be emotionally inhibited. The present study seeks to extend these findings by systematically evaluating what role age, sex, and etiology factors may have in the behavioral adjustment of groups of children…

This volume is the second in "The Course of Life" series which contains original contributions from an international group of scientists and clinicians who have produced much of current knowledge about the phases of human personality development. These contributions cover the continuum of human development from the prenatal phase through…

A review of the literature reveals that three writing skills have been of particular interest to writing researchers recently. First, work on planning the rhetorical strategy recognizes three components of the planning process: prewriting, pausing, and reviewing what has been written. Second, research on audience analysis indicates that maturity…

Sport and athletic environments provide evidence that the characteristics of the situation in which a leader is found are closely linked to the degree of success that the leader will enjoy. Four situational or "contingency" theories attempt to delineate the relationship between leadership style and effective results: (1) Fiedler's Contingency…

The strengths and limitations of a developmental approach to the study of teacher change are described. The developmental approach is characterized by: (1) a focus on an end state (maturity); (2) the assumption that all individuals go through the same sequence of changes leading to that end state; and (3) the assumption that these changes are…