Statistics reporting adolescent use of ergogenic agents are staggering. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance, 6.1% of students from grades 9 through 12 had taken illegal anabolic steroids without a prescription one or more times during their lifetime. Additionally, more adolescent athletes…

We examined the salience of multiple ecological factors (individual, family, peer, school, and community) as differential predictors of smoking for adolescent African-Americans and Whites in a sample of 2,029 7th-12th grade girls from a Mid-Atlantic southeastern state. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that significant predictors of…

Responsive evaluation offers a perspective in which evaluation is reframed from the assessment of program interventions on the basis of policy makers' goals to an engagement with and among all stakeholders about the value and meaning of their practice. Responsive evaluators have to be extra sensitive to power relations given the deliberate…

Incidents of school violence have prompted calls for school communities to create environments that encourage student bystanders to act responsibly and proactively when they confront a range of violent incidents, from bullying and fights to weapon carrying and other serious threats to school safety. It is not always clear, however, what bystanders…

The present study evaluated the impact of Urban Improv (UI), a theater-based youth violence prevention (YVP) program developed for inner-city youth, on three behavioral and psychological outcome domains: aggressive behaviors, prosocial behaviors, and scholastic attention and engagement. This study compared outcomes for 77 elementary school…

Reading Recovery is a short-term intervention for first-grade children with reading and writing difficulties. This longitudinal study investigated the performance of a cohort of 1998 Reading Recovery students on later literacy achievement as measured by the 2001 Grade 4 Maine Educational Assessment (MEA). The results showed that the average MEA…

As researchers continue to analyze the role of parenting both in the development of childhood overweight and in obesity prevention, studies of child nutrition and growth are detailing the ways in which parents affect their children's development of food- and activity-related behaviors. Ana Lindsay, Katarina Sussner, Juhee Kim, and Steven Gortmaker…

This study examined condom use intentions among a large diverse group of African American adolescents and provides useful information to assist in the development of effective HIV prevention interventions. Using the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), we explored which constructs are important in shaping intentions to use condoms for younger versus…

Kansas school psychologists were extremely accurate in their estimates of violence in their own schools and viewed school violence prevention as an important part of their job, regardless of the rates of violence in their districts. Most had at least some involvement in their own school's violence prevention program, although many reported that…

Although there is very little research in the area of including parents in juvenile sex offender treatment, one of the factors that might be worth exploring is how the parental relationship may aid in successful relapse prevention. Since the family environment is a potential risk factor for adolescent sex offenders, integration of relapse…

Most accounts of bullying and intervention programs against violence in school deal with aggregate prevalence estimates and outcome measures. Case studies are rare. Bullying occurs regularly within classrooms. Psychological aggression through teasing and harassment is more difficult to detect. Bullying and bullies are relatively persistent,…

In this article, the authors first highlight the experiences in global monitoring and evaluation (M&E) coordination and collaboration. They then describe the collaboration experiences of two U.S. government agencies active in HIV prevention and care, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Centers for Disease Control and…

Paid employment is an important feature of adolescent life. Too often, it has negative health consequences, including more than 200,000 workplace injuries to 14 to 17 year olds every year. Training teens about occupational safety is part of an overall strategy to address this problem. When the project described in this article began, there were…

Johnson C. Smith University, one of the nation's oldest historically Black colleges and universities, has a peer education program known as Students with a Realistic Mission (SWARM). SWARM's primary focus is on HIV/AIDS, other sexually transmitted disease prevention, alcohol education, and other drug awareness. During the spring 2000 semester, we…

The report submitted by the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education includes faulty claims and reasoning that devalue special education and hinder efforts to better meet the needs of students with disabilities. We question the commission's findings and recommendations regarding closing the achievement gap, practicing prevention,…