OBJECTIVE To ascertain the health and school performance of teenagers born before 29 weeks gestation (extremely low gestational age (ELGA)) and to compare those in mainstream school with classroom controls. METHODS Three geographically defined cohorts of babies born in 1983 and 1984 were traced at the age of 15-16 years. Their health, abilities, and educational performance were ascertained us...

We use 9 Add Health high schools with longitudinal network data to assess whether adolescent drinkers choose friends who drink, prefer friends whose friends drink, if selection differs between new and existing friendships, and between schools. Utilizing dynamic social network models that control for friend influences on individual alcohol use, the results show that drinkers do not strongly pref...

BACKGROUND The age at menarche in the Thai population has not been determined since 1997. This study recruited adolescents in Bangkok Metropolis to determine the age at menarche and its associations with health and socioeconomic status. METHODS This cross-sectional study used a two-step stratified sampling strategy to recruit 1,020 female students, aged 10-16 years, from schools in Dusit dist...

BACKGROUND In western countries, late-onset asthmatics are more severe than early-onset asthmatics in clinic-based studies. However, whether asthma occurrence rates were higher in late ages than in younger ages was inconclusive. This information is essentially lacking in Asian population. METHODS The participants were schoolchildren's parents recruited from 94 elementary and middle schools in...

There is increasing academic and policy interest in interventions aiming to promote young people's health by ensuring that the school environment supports healthy behaviours. The purpose of this review was to summarize the current evidence on school-based policy, physical and social-environmental influences on adolescent physical activity and sedentary behaviour. Electronic databases were searc...

The effect of formal education, as opposed to chronological age, on intelligence development has suffered from inadequate empirical investigation. Most studies of this issue have relied on natural variation in exposure to school among children of the same age, thus confounding differences in schooling with differences in other intelligence-related variables. This difficulty can be overcome by a...

"If other sources of ethical values have declined in influence, educators have a responsibility to contribute in any way they can to the moral development of their students," writes Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard (Bok, 1976, p. 26). Most educational policy-makers and the public seem to agree that schools and colleges should promote moral development in their students. Yet, there is ...

The purpose of this manuscript is to assess and compare HIV risk behaviors among early adolescents after a three-year pilot study. A total of 135 public and private junior high schools students completed the intervention protocol. A self-administered questionnaire was given at baseline and at the end of the third year (fourth measure). Descriptive and inferential analyses were performed using S...

The objective of the study was to present socioeconomic and geographic inequalities in adolescent smoking in Scotland. The international literature suggests there is no obvious pattern in the geography of adolescent smoking, with rural areas having a higher prevalence than urban areas in some countries, and a lower prevalence in others. These differences are most likely due to substantive diffe...

BACKGROUND AND STUDY HYPOTHESIS Are dyslexic children and teenagers more creative than non-dyslexic children and teenagers? Whether creativity is higher in dyslexia, and whether this could be related to neurological development specific to the dyslexic disorder, or to compensatory strategies acquired later in life, remains unclear. Here, we suggest an additional role of differential educational...