In Massachusetts, a 12-year-old girl delivering newspapers is killed when a car strikes her bicycle. In Los Angeles, a 14-year-old boy repeatedly falls asleep in class, exhausted from his evening job. Although children and adolescents may benefit from working, there may also be negative social effects and sometimes danger in their jobs. Protecting Youth at Work looks at what is known about work done by children and adolescents and the effects of that work on their physical and emotional health and social functioning. The committee recommends specific initiatives for legislators, regulators, researchers, and employers. This book provides historical perspective on working children and adolescents in America and explores the framework of child labor laws that govern that work. The committee presents a wide range of data and analysis on the scope of youth employment, factors that put children and adolescents at risk in the workplace, and the positive and negative effects of employment, including data on educational attainment and lifestyle choices. Protecting Youth at Work also includes discussions of special issues for minority and disadvantaged youth, young workers in agriculture, and children who work in family-owned businesses.

This book addresses a broad array of pressing challenges of longitudinal surveys and provides innovative solutions to methodological problems based on the example of the NEPS. It covers longitudinal issues such as sampling, weighting, recruiting and fieldwork management, the design of longitudinal surveys and the implementation of constructs, conducting competence tests over the life course, effective methods to improve and to maintain the highest level of data quality, data management tools for large-scale longitudinal surveys, the dissemination of research data to heterogeneous scientific communities, as well as establishing a long-term public relations and communications unit integrating a study’s stakeholder community over time.

For undergraduates following any course of study, it is essential to develop the ability to write effectively. Yet the processes by which students become more capable and ready to meet the challenges of writing for employers, the wider public, and their own purposes remain largely invisible. Developing Writers in Higher Education shows how learning to write for various purposes in multiple disciplines leads college students to new levels of competence. This volume draws on an in-depth study of the writing and experiences of 169 University of Michigan undergraduates, using statistical analysis of 322 surveys, qualitative analysis of 131 interviews, use of corpus linguistics on 94 electronic portfolios and 2,406 pieces of student writing, and case studies of individual students to trace the multiple paths taken by student writers. Topics include student writers’ interaction with feedback; perceptions of genre; the role of disciplinary writing; generality and certainty in student writing; students’ concepts of voice and style; students’ understanding of multimodal and digital writing; high school’s influence on college writers; and writing development after college. The digital edition offers samples of student writing, electronic portfolios produced by student writers, transcripts of interviews with students, and explanations of some of the analysis conducted by the contributors. This is an important book for researchers and graduate students in multiple fields. Those in writing studies get an overview of other longitudinal studies as well as key questions currently circulating. For linguists, it demonstrates how corpus linguistics can inform writing studies. Scholars in higher education will gain a new perspective on college student development. The book also adds to current understandings of sociocultural theories of literacy and offers prospective teachers insights into how students learn to write. Finally, for high school teachers, this volume will answer questions about college writing. Companion Website Click here to access the Developing Writers project and its findings at the interactive companion website. Project Data Access the data from the project through this tutorial.

The National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) is the third in a series of longitudinal studies sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics. The NELS:88 is being conducted in several waves, beginning with a base year experience of approximately 25,000 eighth graders. This report profiles the family characteristics and the level of involvement reported by the parents of 1988 eighth graders, using the base year survey and dropout data from the first follow-up. About 93 percent of the parents of the first year sample were interviewed to provide information about home life and family experiences. The parent component is not, however, a representative sample of eighth graders' parents. Their inclusion is linked to the student participants. This study examined child-directed involvement, including activities such as parent-child discussions and school-directed involvement such as parent-teacher association membership and volunteering in the school. There was some indication that parent involvement was related to whether or not students scored below the basic level in reading or mathematics proficiency, but there was a strong relationship between parent involvement and whether or not a student dropped out of school between the 8th and 10th grades. There are 26 tables and 18 figures presenting study findings. (SLD)