Group leaders of 10- to 13-year-olds may use this program guide to help the preteens interact with young children through six discussion meetings and five visits with a preschool child at home. Discussion topics concern (1) the family environment of young children, (2) children's play; (3) children's play areas at home, (4) safety at home, (5)…

This paper addresses girls' patterns of computer avoidance at the middle school and other grade levels. It reviews the evidence for a gender gap in computer use in several areas: in school, at home, in computer camps, in computer magazines, and in computer-related jobs. It compares the computer equity issue to math avoidance, and cites the middle…

To determine when and how children begin to differentiate among messages with different goals and to examine whether such differentiation leads to differences in interpretational strategies, 90 children between the ages of 4 and 11 viewed each of five different television messages representing four different message types. The types were: (1)…

Basic research and programs in substance abuse dealing directly with rural and small town populations lag far behind those aimed at urban groups, in both quality and quantity. A study was conducted to identify factors related to substance use by a preadolescent and early adolescent rural and small town population. Data were collected from 496…

It is important to examine the correlates of drug use and abuse among early adolescents to identify common patterns and factors of the beginning stages of drug abuse. The relationships between personal substance use, health beliefs, peer use, stated intention to use drugs in the future, sex, and religion were examined using data collected from 265…

The Coalition Concerned with Adolescent Pregnancy is sponsoring a project entitled Planning Programs for Young Adolescents which focuses on after-school needs of children between the ages of 10 and 15 in Orange County, California. To determine these needs, needs assessment surveys were completed by 90 seventh grade students and 93 parents. The…

The purposes of the present investigation are to compare the structure and level of multidimensional self-concepts for boys and girls from England and Australia, and to demonstrate the use of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) in making such comparisons. Subjects were random samples of 303 English preadolescents and 303 Australians that were…

Explored impact of peers on retained students. Second- and fifth-grade retained and nonretained children provided measures of peer reward allocations, preferences for social and task partners, attitudes about school environment, report card expectancy, and self-esteem. Peer discrimination was moderated by the rater's age, gender, physical size and…

Assessed differences in self-perceptions, peer perceptions, and attributions of relative responsibility for aggressive and nonagressive boys. Used semantic differential ratings following brief competitive dyadic discussion, and observer ratings. Perceptual and attributional biases operated in social interactions. Unlike nonaggressive boys,…

Investigated academic achievement of Mexican-American students and conflict in values with Anglo-American culture. Mexican and Anglo-American students, their parents, and teachers reported their adherence to traditional school values and evaluated the importance of field independent behaviors to success in school. Attitudinal differences were…

Subjects, ages 3 to 5 and 9 to 11, were shown a videotape that presented either a frightening stimulus directly or a character's fearful response to a threatening stimulus that was suggested rather than shown directly. Both self-reported emotional reactions and physiological responses were consistent with a cognitive-developmental view of the…

A study of 45 hearing-impaired students (ages 10 to 19) investigated their understanding of English verb-particle combinations of varying syntactic and semantic difficulty. Results suggest an order of difficulty in learning. Idioms were found to be more difficult than literal meanings with little improvement over the age range of the subjects.…

Cognitive controls were isolated through factor analysis with 59 intermediate-grade gifted students, and three cognitive styles were defined by cluster analysis. The cognitive style labeled "strict percept-strict concept" was associated with greater facility in divergent thinking. Study findings support explanations of giftedness through…

Charts were reviewed to identify the characteristics of 511 prepubertal children brought to a Montreal, Quebec (Canada) pediatric hospital for evaluation regarding alleged sexual abuse. Specific characteristics were found to distinguish victims on the basis of their age, sex, and type of sexual abuse (intra- versus extra-familial). (Author/JDD)

A program was designed to provide gifted preadolescent students with a better resistance to stress. Based on the stress inoculation procedure, the program's six sessions gradually exposed students to stressful situations through imagery techniques and role-playing, while helping them apply newly learned coping skills. (JDD)