Social workers have the task of addressing issues that are unique to ethnic minority youth in clinical practice; however, they may be ill equipped to begin practice with these youth due to a lack of specificity within generalist curricula. Using African-American youth as an example, the paper provides evidence that there are critical areas of development and functioning that diverge from the ge...

Title of Document: THE IMPACT OF PARENTING PRACTICES AND EARLY CHILDHOOD CURRICULA ON CHILDREN’S ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT AND SOCIAL COMPETENCE Anne Townsend Kessenich, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Directed By: Professor Sandra L. Hofferth Department of Family Studies Current research highlights the importance of early social competence for later academic success. Nevertheless, despite that documente...

Latent growth models estimated developmental trajectories for adolescents' math and English self-perceptions (perceived talent, success expectancies), values (intrinsic, utility) and task perceptions (task difficulty, effort required). A longitudinal cohort-sequential study included 1,323 participants spanning Grades 7 to 11, with Occasion 1 mean ages 13.19, 12.36, and 14.41, respectively, for ...

Individuals with a higher education are more likely to migrate, increasing the chance of meeting a spouse with a different ancestral background. In this context, the presence of strong educational assortment can result in greater ancestry differences within more educated spouse pairs, while less educated individuals are more likely to mate with someone with whom they share more ancestry. We exa...

Understanding sources of performance bias in science assessment provides important insights into whether science curricula and/or assessments are valid representations of student abilities. Research investigating assessment bias due to factors such as instrument structure, participant characteristics, and item types are well documented across a variety of disciplines. However, the relationships...

My purpose today is to explore implications of cultural psychology for guiding educational practice, especially educational practice in settings where the children come from many different home cultures, ethnicities, and social classes. You will note that I phrased my topic as a question. Many scholars, including myself, have raised questions about how classical cultural-psychological ideas han...

Cancer illness representations and screening history among residents of Kolkata, India, were investigated along with socio-demographic characteristics in an effort to understand possible motivations for health behavior. A total of 106 participants were recruited from community locations in Kolkata, India and completed surveys including demographics, the illness perception questionnaire-revised ...

Between 1968 and 2013, two striking changes occurred in the characteristics of US parents. First, the share of households headed by a single parent grew from 19% to 40%. Second, the share of households in which at least one parent has a fouryear college degree grew from 17% to 45%, with most of the increase coming from dual parent households. We first conduct simple accounting exercises to show...