Examines the impact of heterosexism on all children, noting that it is part of the educational infrastructure. Provides educators and administrators with information about the developmental nature of sexual identity, and offers preliminary recommendations about how educational institutions can begin developing a more open community that celebrates…

Investigation conducted to link Big-Five personality traits with behavior problems identified in childhood. Results show distinct patterns of behavior problems associated with various personality characteristics. Preliminary data indicate that identifying Big-Five personality trait patterns may be a useful dimension of assessment for understanding…

Examines school adjustment outcomes and emotional learning difficulties for students who participated in readiness kindergartens and pre-first classes. Significant differences were noted in retention rates, dropout rates, and special education placement rates. In spite of limitations of research, the practice of placing children in programs based…

Introduces the basic ideas of Jacob Moreno's (1934) historical model of sociometric judgment and discusses how developmental psychologists have used this model in child development research. Traces the development of sociometric techniques to study children's peer relations, and notes the limitations of contemporary sociometric techniques. (JPB)

Examined the developmental relationship of children's motivational orientations and reading skills from preschool through grade 2. Results for 48 children show that regressive and progressive reading career groups of matching initial phonemic awareness and verbal ability did not differ motivationally at preschool but motivational orientation did…

Examines gender variant childhood development from a holistic viewpoint where children and environments are understood as a unit. Discusses the recognition of gender identity, the adaptation process through which gender variant children handle the stress of their environment, and the overall developmental tasks of a transgendered childhood.…

Provides a first-person account of one individual's experience as a plainclothes, African American, male-to-female transgendered person, describing his life growing up and how he balanced internal and external factors and offering implications for social work practice with both plainclothes and fixed/prepared male-to-female transgendered youth.…

Preservice teachers, social workers, and counselors studied resilience while performing service-learning projects in Wisconsin elementary/middle schools. Middle school teachers conducted service-learning projects in their classrooms. The college students gained valuable knowledge about teaching and ways to foster resilience in children. (SK)

Links the developmental-familial implications of parental alcoholism with the individuation process. Suggests a developmental agenda for understanding adolescents, summarizes the literature on children of alcoholism, and focuses on elements of individuation which have relevance to children from alcoholic families. Looks at the concepts of physical…

Tested 5- through 9-year-old children in structured and unstructured contexts to determine their ability to demonstrate contrasts in tempo and dynamics using a synthesizer keyboard. Shows that they were able to demonstrate contrasts in loudness and duration. Reports further results based on varied environmental situations. (DSK)

Offers a commentary on five contributions to recent developments in the study of cognitive development that have been selected for this special issue. The relevance of each author's paper to issues that are central to cognitivists today and post-Piagetian developmental psychologists is discussed, and the overall need of evolutionary models to…

When pioneering longitudinal studies of child development extended into adulthood, they generated issues that could not be addressed satisfactorily by available theories, including the recognition that individual lives are influenced by their ever-changing historical context and that human development concepts should apply to processes across the…

Spiritual socialization can be central to children's healthy development. An ethnographic study of the beliefs of African-American adults about children's socialization in Sunday school, and an ethnic-sensitive social work intervention designed to support the development of resilience in African-American children are described. (Author/EMK)

Three big ideas from brain science have arisen during the past 20 to 30 years: neural connections form rapidly early in life; critical periods occur in development; and enriched environments profoundly affect brain development during the early years. Current brain research has little to offer educational practice or policy. (10 references) (MLH)

This study (with 16 children and 11 adults) examined an alternative to the Developmental Weighting Shift model which explains age-related differences in labeling of speech stimuli as due to increasing experience with word-internal structure. Findings rejected the alternative model, that changes in perceptual weighting strategies are due to…