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Decades of research indicate the important connections among academic motivation and achievement, social relationships, and school culture. However, much of this research has been conducted in homogenous American schools serving middle class, average achieving, Anglo-student populations. This book argues that school culture is a reflection of the society in which the school is embedded and comprises various aspects, including individualism, competition, cultural stereotypes, and extrinsically guided values and rewards. Chapters address three specific conceptual questions: How do differences in academic motivation for diverse groups of students change over time? How do students' social cognitions influence their motivational processes and outcomes in school? And what has been done to enhance academic motivation? To answer this last question, the chapters describe empirically validated intervention programs for improving academic motivation in students from elementary school through college.

One of the most important questions about children's development involves how knowledge acquisition depends on the effect of language experience. To what extent, and in what ways, is a child's cognitive development influenced by their early experience of, and access to, language? Likewise, what are the effects on development of impaired access to language? This book confronts directly the issue of how possessing an enhanced or impaired access to language influences children's development. Its focus is on learning environments, theory of mind understanding, and the process of deriving meaning from conversations. The book features chapters which are concerned with bilingualism, deafness, atypical child development, and development in cultures with limited vocabularies in areas such as number concepts. Throughout, it maps out what is known about the interface between language and cognitive development and the prospects for the future directions in research and applied settings.

Words are the building blocks of language. An understanding of how words are learned is thus central to any theory of language acquisition. Although there has been a surge in our understanding of children's vocabulary growth, theories of word learning focus primarily on object nouns. Word learning theories must explain not only the learning of object nouns, but also the learning of other, major classes of words — verbs and adjectives. Verbs form the hub of the sentence because they determine the sentence's argument structure. Researchers throughout the world recognize how our understanding of language acquisition can be at best partial if we cannot comprehend how verbs are learned. This book enters the relatively uncharted waters of early verb learning, focusing on the universal, conceptual foundations for verb learning, and how these foundations intersect with the burgeoning language system.

Of the 33 million adolescents in the United States, almost 10 million are at risk of failing to become responsible adults. They attend schools that do not serve their needs, lack the support of caring adults, and, as a result, are alienated from mainstream society. African-American and Hispanic children, increasingly segregated in disadvantaged neighborhoods, are particularly vulnerable. This book takes a close look at the lives of young people, identifies some of their problems, and presents solutions based on state-of-the-art prevention and treatment strategies. The chapters examine important issues in adolescents' lives—sex, violence, drugs, health, mental health, and education. Reviewing successful prevention programs and policy studies, they demonstrate that we know what to do to prevent high-risk behaviors: young people need to establish relationships with adults; parents need to be involved in their children's lives; and programs need to be comprehensive, sensitive to cultural differences, and staffed by highly trained personnel. The chapters argue that turning our backs on adolescents will lead to disturbing consequences: the achievement gap will grow, outcomes will worsen, school systems will struggle with the growing disparities, and we as a nation will fall behind the rest of the world in our capacity to educate our youth. If, however, we decide that we want a better quality of life for our children, we will ensure that every young person has access to an excellent education. Schools, youth workers, and parents cannot alone provide a better quality of life for our adolescents, but each must play a major role, and all must work together.

While the period of transition from adolescence to adulthood has become a recent focus for developmental psychologists and child mental health practitioners, the full role of the family during this period is only beginning to be explored. Many compelling questions, of interest to anyone involved in adolescence research, remain unanswered. To what extent do family experiences influence the way one navigates through emerging adulthood? How do we begin to understand the interplay between adolescents' contexts and their development and well-being? This book offers an accessible synthesis of research, theories, and perspectives on the family processes that contribute to development. Chapters cover a wide variety of topics surrounding the link between family processes and individual development, including adolescent romantic relationships, emotion regulation, resilience in contexts of risk, and socio-cultural and ethnic influences on development. Drawing on diverse research and methodological approaches that include direct family observations, interviews, and narrative analyses, this volume presents cutting-edge conceptual and empirical work on the key developmental tasks and challenges in the transition between adolescence and adulthood.

We currently struggle to create satisfying intimate or close relationships, something we yearn for but often fail to achieve in our evolving world culture. With our changing concepts of and demands on close relationships, we need new ways to understand what facilitates satisfying close relationships. In this book, a new theory, called postformal thought, is presented, along with previously unpublished related studies and research approaches and the idea that complex cognition is useful for co-constructing satisfying intimate relationships. The personal relational aspects of relationships as well as cultural, historical, and social factors are combined to give a big-picture view of cognitive aspects of thriving close relationships. The book rests on 30 years of research in adult cognitive development and on other recent empirical research conducted by the author and others. Cases are presented to illustrate the thinking of persons in close and satisfying relationships. Future research and applications are suggested in the final section of the book.

Humans' first languages may have been expressed through sign. Today, sign languages have been found around the world, including communities that do not have access to education or literacy. In addition to serving as a primary medium of communication for deaf communities, they have become among the most popular choices for second language study by hearing students. The status of sign languages as complex and complete languages that are clearly the linguistic “equal” of spoken languages is no longer questioned. Research on the characteristics of visual languages has blossomed since the 1960s, and careful study of deaf children’s development of sign language skills is pursued to obtain information to promote deaf children’s development. Equally important, the study of how children learn sign language provides excellent theoretical insights into how the human brain acquires and structures sign languages. In the same sense that cross-linguistic research has led to a better understanding of how language affects development, cross-modal research allows us to study the acquisition of language in the absence of a spoken phonology. This book provides cogent summaries of what is known about early gestural development, interactive processes adapted to visual communication, and the processes of semantic, syntactic and pragmatic development in sign. It addresses theoretical as well as applied questions, often with a focus on aspects of language which are (or perhaps are not) related to the modality of the language.

Throughout history there have been efforts to help deaf children develop spoken language through which they could have full access to the hearing world. These efforts, although pursued seriously and with great care, frequently proved fruitless and often resulted only in passionate arguments over the efficacy of particular approaches. Although some deaf children did develop spoken language, there was little evidence to suggest that this development had been facilitated by any particular educational approach, and moreover, many, even most deaf children — especially those with profound loss — never develop spoken language at all. Recent technological advances, however, have led to more positive expectations for deaf children's acquisitions of spoken language: innovative testing procedures for hearing allow for early identification of loss which leads to intervention services during the first weeks and months of life. Programmable hearing aids allow more children to make use of residual hearing abilities. Children with the most profound losses are able to reap greater benefits from cochlear-implant technologies. At the same time, there have been great advances in research into the processes of deaf children's language development and the outcomes they experience. As a result, we are for the first time accruing a sufficient base of evidence and information to allow reliable predictions about children's progress which will, in turn, lead to further advances. This book presents information on the new world evolving for deaf and hard-of-hearing children and the improved expectations for their acquisition of spoken language.

The puzzle that motivates Agency and Joint Attention is how people are able at one and the same time to maintain their own sense of autonomy, taking responsibility for their own actions and distinguishing them from the actions of others, while still being able to understand, appreciate, and coordinate their thoughts and actions with other people. This volume emphasizes the special role of human self-reflective consciousness in this complex but central coordination.

Ethanol (or, as it is more popularly known, alcohol) use has a long and ubiquitous history. The prevailing tendency to view alcohol merely as a ‘social problem’ or the popular notion that alcohol only serves to provide us with a ‘hedonic’ high, masks its importance in the social fabric of many human societies both past and present. To understand alcohol use as a complex social practice that has been exploited by humans for thousands of years requires cross-disciplinary insight from social/cultural anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, psychologists, primatologists, and biologists. This multidisciplinary volume examines the broad use of alcohol in the human lineage and its wider relationship to social contexts such as feasting, sacred rituals, and social bonding. Alcohol abuse is a small part of a much more complex and social pattern of widespread alcohol use by humans. This alone should prompt us to explore the evolutionary origins of this ancient practice and the socially functional reasons for its continued popularity. The objectives of this volume are: (1) to understand how and why non-human primates and other animals use alcohol in the wild, and its relevance to understanding the social consumption of alcohol in humans; (2) to understand the social function of alcohol in human prehistory; (3) to understand the sociocultural significance of alcohol across human societies; and (4) to explore the social functions of alcohol consumption in contemporary society.

Chapters in this volume reflect, to one degree or another, eight critical aspects of contemporary research attempting to understand the etiologic processes that heighten risk or resilience factors for substance use disorders: (1) a focus on systemic frameworks for understanding developmental process, (2) the heterogeneity of developmental pathways, (3) the role of genes and epigenetic–experience transactions, (4) risk cumulative/cascade models of the effects of exposure to adverse childhood experiences, (5) negotiating developmental transitional periods, (6) neurobiological embodiment of adverse childhood experiences, (7) links between alcohol use disorder and tobacco addictive behaviors, and (8) longitudinal studies and data analysis within and between studies.

Not only is the future of our public schools in jeopardy, so is our democracy. Public schools are central to a flourishing democracy, where children learn how to deliberate and solve problems together, build shared identities, and come to value justice and liberty. As citizen support for public schools wanes, our democratic way of life is at risk. While we often hear about the poor performance of students and teachers, the current educational crisis is at heart not about accountability, but rather about citizen responsibility. Yet citizens increasingly do not feel that public schools are our schools, that we have influence over them or responsibility for their outcomes. Citizens have become watchdogs of public institutions largely from the perspective of consumers, without seeing ourselves as citizens who compose the public of public institutions. Accountability becomes more about finding fault with and placing blame on our schools and teachers, rather than about taking responsibility as citizens for shaping our expectations of schools, determining the criteria we use to measure their success, or supporting schools in achieving those goals. This book sheds light on recent shifts in education and citizenship, helping the public to understand not only how schools now work, but also how citizens can take an active role in shaping them. It provides citizens with tools, habits, practices, and knowledge necessary to support schools. It offers a vision of how we can cultivate citizens who will continue to support public schools and thereby keep democracy strong.

The social contexts in which children develop have transformed over recent decades, but also over millennia. Modern parenting practices have diverged greatly from ancestral practices, which included natural childbirth, extensive and on-demand breastfeeding, constant touch, responsiveness to the needs of the child, free play in nature with multiple-aged playmates, and multiple adult caregivers. Only recently have scientists begun to document the outcomes for the presence or absence of such parenting practices, but early results indicate that psychological wellbeing is impacted by these factors. This book addresses how a shift in the way we parent can influence child outcomes. It examines evolved contexts for mammalian development, optimal and suboptimal contexts for human evolved needs, and the effects on children's development and human wellbeing. The book examines how different parenting styles and cultural personality influence one another. Chapters discuss the nature of childrearing, social relationships, the range of personalities people exhibit, the social and moral skills expected of adults, and what “wellbeing” looks like. As a solid knowledge base regarding normal development is considered integral to understanding psychopathology, this book also focuses on the effects of early childhood maltreatment. By increasing our understanding of basic mammalian emotional and motivational needs in contexts representative of our ancestral conditions, we may be in a better position to facilitate changes in social structures and systems that better support optimal human development.

Evolutionary psychology aims to understand and describe human behaviour in the light of past and continuing selection and adaptation. Still a young and developing discipline, the past couple of decades has seen enormous progress. As the science matures, its scope is inevitably beginning to broaden towards tackling contemporary issues in human society. To date, however, concerted effort to apply principle to practice has been patchy and limited in extent. This book aims to provide a foundation for an incipient focus on applications of evolutionary psychology. It draws together a collection of renowned academics from a very disparate set of fields, whose common interest lies in using evolutionary thinking to inform their research. It is the first book to overtly consider how basic evolutionary thinking is being applied to such a wide range of specific social, economic and technological problems.

Although research in music psychology, education and therapy has expanded exponentially in the 21st century, there is something of a ‘black hole’ around which much of the discourse circles: music itself. While writers have largely been occupied with what people think about musical engagement, the little musical analysis that exists has tended to be at a low level compared to the sophisticated non-musical exploration that is present. This highlights the tenuous connection between musical enquiry in the context of the humanities and that occurring within the social sciences, the one exception being the partial intersection of music theory and psychology. Here, however, progress has largely been in one direction, with something of the objectivity that characterizes psychological research reading across to music analysis, and taking the form of what has been called ‘empirical musicology’. This book takes a further, reciprocal step, in which certain of the techniques of empirical musicology (in particular, the author’s ‘zygonic’ theory) are used to inform thinking in the domains of music-psychological, educational and therapeutic research. A new, interdisciplinary sphere of endeavour is sketched out, for which the term ‘applied musicology’ is coined. The book adopts a phenomenological, inductive approach, using the analysis of hundreds of real-life examples of musical engagement and interaction to build new theories of musical intentionality and influence, and to shed new light on our understanding of aspects of music perception and cognition. This book is intended to lay the foundations upon which a new category of interdisciplinary work will be built.

Attention is a complex and multidimensional construct. It depends on distributed neural networks; it is linked to multiple sources of information from the environment and to complex motor, emotional, and motivational systems. Taking this functional approach, this book focuses on visual attention and its underlying processes in the first four to five years of life. The book is organized around two overlapping structures. One is the division of attention into three conceptual domains: selectivity, state, and executive- or higher-level control. The second organizational structure revolves around the development of two attention systems during the early years: the first is an orienting/investigative system; and the second is a more voluntary system related to inhibitory processes, planning, goal-oriented activity, and to the larger construct of self-regulation. Within these two structures, the book discusses the research and theory relevant to the development of selection, modulation of intensity or state, and the higher-level control of attention. It also discusses individual variation in these three aspects of attention. It includes individual differences in patterns of attention and underlying temperamental factors, and differences in developmental trajectory. It also address deviations from the normal range of attention and possible developmental scenarios to account for them. For both development and individual differences, the book covers the research on behavioural and psycho-physiological indices of attention. In addition, the book makes inferences from the research in order to discuss the non-observable processes underlying these indices.

There is a growing realization that many adolescents with hearing loss require special attention. Despite the benefits of early diagnosis, early amplification, and early intervention, some adolescents with hearing loss do not achieve age equivalent developmental milestones. The purpose of this book is to assist auditory (re)habilitation practitioners in mitigating the negative effects of hearing loss on communicative, socio-emotional, and academic performance of adolescents who rely on auditory-based spoken language to communicate. It is essential that adolescents whose parents choose auditory-based spoken language, receive systematic, consistent, well-planned, appropriate auditory (re)habilitation. This book presents an evidence-based approach to auditory (re)habilitation for adolescents with hearing loss. Practitioners are provided with theoretical and practical strategies for intervention, targeting a historically overlooked population. Practitioners will find its framework, based on enhancing adolescent inner resources, an informative and unique approach toward enabling adolescent self-determination.

Language acquisition is a contentious field of research occupied by cognitive and developmental psychologists, linguists, philosophers, and biologists. Perhaps the key component to understanding how language is mastered is explaining word acquisition. At twelve months, an infant learns new words slowly and laboriously; but at twenty months, he or she acquires an average of ten new words per day. How can we explain this phenomenal change? A theory of word acquisition deepens our understanding of the nature of language but also provides real insight into the workings of the developing mind. This book presents competing word acquisition theories that have emerged in the past decade. Each theory is presented by the researcher. The book provides introductory and summary chapters to help assess each theoretical model.

Why are we conscious? How can it be that information processed in the brains of living creatures is accompanied by subjective experience? While such questions have been topics of philosophical debates for centuries, the past decades have seen a surge of scientific interest with the result that the research literature has expanded greatly, particularly in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive science. Interestingly, this scientific work has made use of a wide variety of different methods without much consensus on how one might in fact measure subjective consciousness. This situation makes it potentially impossible to compare and contrast experimental findings, and difficult to show that consciousness research is a discipline going in a particular direction or has a particular focus. This book provides an overview of methods and approaches for studying consciousness. It aims to make progress giving concrete tools for how to investigate consciousness in combination with theoretical discussions of possibilities and limitations of each method.

In Bilingualism and Bilingual Deaf Education, volume editors Marc Marschark, Gladys Tang, and Harry Knoors bring together diverse issues and evidence in two related domains: bilingualism among deaf learners - in sign language and the written/spoken vernacular - and bilingual deaf education. The volume examines each issue with regard to language acquisition, language functioning, social-emotional functioning, and academic outcomes. It considers bilingualism and bilingual deaf education within the contexts of mainstream education of deaf and hard-of-hearing students in regular schools, placement in special schools and programs for the deaf, and co-enrollment programs, which are designed to give deaf students the best of both educational worlds. With a focus on evidence-based practice, contributors consider recent investigations into bilingualism and bilingual programming in different educational contexts and in different countries that may have different models of using spoken and signed languages as well as different cultural expectations.