This article summarizes data from a 2004 study of over 300,000 high school students (aged 13-18 years) in nine South American countries. A probabilistic sample targeted urban secondary schools, utilizing a self-administered questionnaire on prevalence and frequency of substance use. Multivariate analysis showed that volatile substances were the first or second most commonly reported substances ...

This paper studies attainment in secondary schools. We estimate an education production function in which attainment depends upon parental inputs, peer group inputs and schooling inputs. We find that the most powerful parental input is parental interest in children, as assessed by teachers. We find a strong peer group effect. The school pupil-teacher ratio does not enter significantly. The only...

CORRECTION After publication of the article [1], it has been brought to our attention that there is an error in figure 1. The number of excluded secondary schools should read "50" and not "72". The rest of the data in the figure is accurate.

As the nation's schools seek to fulfill the academic imperatives of the federal No Child Left Behind Act and associated state imperatives, they may be forgetting an important missing element in boosting academic achievement: directly confronting the mental health and psychosocial needs that impede a significant percentage of children and adolescents. This article explores the available research...

As with other forms of violent behaviour, bullying is the result of multiple influences acting on different societal levels. Yet the majority of studies on bullying focus primarily on the characteristics of individual bullies and bullied. Fewer studies have explored how the characteristics of central contexts in young people's lives are related to bullying behaviour over and above the influence...

The health and wellbeing of children in lower-income countries is the focus of much international effort, yet there has been very little direct measurement of this. Objective. The current objective was to study the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in a general population of secondary school children in Fiji, a low middle-income country in the Pacific. Methods. Self-reported HRQoL was meas...

The research detailed in this paper provides a systematic description and analysis of grouping practices in primary and secondary schools in England. Practices are compared to main findings in developmental and educational literature with regard to effective contexts for learning and recent ideas about pedagogy. The research is based on an analysis of 4924 groupings from 672 Reception, Year 2 a...

This paper examines dynamic changes in educational quality and equity differences in the public school system between Black and other racial groups in postapartheid South Africa, using the ratio of learners to educators in each school, available from the School Register of Needs, 1996 and 2000. The analysis incorporates schooland community-level unobservables and the endogenous movement of lear...

This paper contributes to the discussion about the performance and e¢ ciency of Portuguese secondary schools, using the stochastic production frontier analysis. We discuss the impact of school variables and the environment on output (measured by the average national examination scores), as determinants of the shape of technology and degree of e¢ ciency. We …nd, in particular, that teacher senio...