The upcoming reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) will be contentious, especially given the size of the act and the role it gives the federal government. When making decisions about reauthorization, it is important to consider the early evidence about the act's implementation and effectiveness. The first important finding about NCLB is…

The purpose of this report is to listen to families about "what" mattered most to them and "how" family support has impacted their lives. The findings of this report represent a synthesis of families' voices from 8 focus groups and 35 individual interviews, conducted at centers, office meetings, and homes--with over 100 family members across 13…

The focus of this evaluation study is the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Residential Treatment Curriculum [PTSD RTC]) to treat PTSD in female juvenile offenders. The overall purpose of the evaluation was to assess the implementation of the PTSD RTC at treatment facilities with female juvenile offenders and to evaluate the effect of the intervention…

Flexibility and productivity are hallmarks of human language use. Competent speakers have the capacity to use the words they know to serve a variety of communicative functions, to refer to new and varied exemplars of the categories to which words refer, and in new and varied combinations with other words. When and how children achieve this…

Toward greater specificity in the prediction of externalizing problems in the context of interparental conflict, interactions between children's parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system (PNS and SNS) activity were examined as moderators. PNS activity was indexed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and RSA reactivity (RSA-R) to lab…

Although the onset of illicit substance use during adolescence can hit parents abruptly like a raging flood, its origins likely start as a trickle in early childhood. Understanding antecedent factors and how they grow into a stream that leads to adolescent drug use is important for theories of social development as well as policy formulations to…

This cross-sectional study explored whether participation, from early childhood, in play involving different cognitive abilities predicts visuo-spatial achievement at ages 9, 12, and 15. Based on parental assessment, prior and present practice of spatial manipulation play was found to be consistently more frequent in boys than in girls; the…

Although shy children speak less in social situations, the extent to which their language skills fall behind those of their more outgoing peers remains unclear. We selected 22 temperamentally shy and 22 non-shy children from a larger group of 400 4-year-old children who were prescreened for temperamental shyness by maternal report, using the…

This study demonstrates the potential utility of the Behavioural Style Observational System (BSOS) as a new observational measure of children's behavioural style. The BSOS is an objective, short and easy to use measure that can be readily adapted to a variety of home and laboratory situations. In the present study, 160 mother-child dyads from the…

In this study, we examined relations between kindergartner's emotional security, task involvement and achievement and teacher's supportive presence in a cognitive training setting, in which the familiarity of the teacher was varied. Participants were 48 kindergarten children (mean age = 51.65 months); 16 children were trained by their regular…

We examined the effect of stimulus complexity and frequency on infants' attention responses during an auditory habituation procedure. Five stimuli of different complexity and frequency were presented repeatedly to 80 5-month-old infants. Quicker attention-getting and longer attention-holding responses were obtained with the more complex stimuli.…

This study examined whether the effects on cognitive and language outcomes of a recently developed home-based educational intervention program, Opstap Opnieuw, for 4-6-years-old disadvantaged children could be explained by improved mother-child interaction. The present sample (n = 30) was drawn from a larger sample of Turkish-Dutch families (n =…

This paper considers possible problems researchers might face when interpreting the results of studies that employ variants of the preference procedure. Infants show a tendency to shift their preference from familiar to novel stimuli with increasing exposure to the familiar stimulus, a behaviour that is exploited by the habituation paradigm. This…

In developmental research, the family has mainly been studied through dyadic interaction. Three-way interactions have received less attention, partly because of their complexity. This difficulty may be overcome by distinguishing between four hierarchically embedded functions in three-way interactions: (1) participation (inclusion of all…

Previous research has demonstrated infants' capacity to discriminate between situations in which all the objects successively hidden behind a screen are present, or not, after the removal of the screen. Two types of interpretation have been proposed: counting capacity or object memorization capacity. In the usual paradigm, the missing object in…