In 2 related studies framed by social constructivism theory, the authors explored a fine-grained analysis of adolescents' civic conceptual knowledge and skills and investigated them in relation to factors such as teachers' qualifications and students' classroom experiences. In Study 1 (with about 2,800 U.S. students), the authors identified 4…

Informal reasoning fallacies are violations of critical discussion norms. As epistemological understanding of knowledge justification appears to underlie the informal reasoning skills of argument construction and evaluation, it was hypothesized that adolescents with greater epistemological sophistication would be more able to identify informal…

This study examined how various components of school engagement contribute to the academic performance of African American adolescents. The sample consisted of 499 African American adolescents in Grades 9 to 11. We investigated how adolescents' gender, grade, cognitive functioning, and parental education affect their school engagement and whether…