Decades of research have highlighted the significance of parenting in children's development, yet few studies have focused specifically on the development of parental monitoring strategies in diverse families living in at-risk neighborhoods. The current study investigated the development of active (i.e., parental discussions and curfew rules) and passive (i.e., child communication with parents) parental monitoring strategies across different developmental periods (middle childhood and adolescence; Grades 4–5 and 7–11) as well as individual (child, parent), family, and contextual antecedents (measured in kindergarten) of this parenting behavior. Using an ecological approach, this study evaluated longitudinal data from 753 participants in the Fast Track Project, a multisite study directed at the development and prevention of conduct problems in at-risk children. Latent trajectory modeling results identified little to no mean growth in these monitoring strategies over time, suggesting that families living in at-risk environments may engage in consistent levels of monitoring strategies to ensure children's safety and well-being. Findings also identified several kindergarten antecedents of the growth factors of these parental monitoring strategies including (a) early child conduct problems; (b) parental warmth/involvement, satisfaction, and efficacy; and (c) parent–child relationship quality. These predictive effects largely highlighted the important role of early parenting behaviors on later levels of and growth in parental monitoring strategies. These findings have important implications for potential prevention and intervention targets to promote the development of parental monitoring strategies among families living in more at-risk contexts.

The possibility of exploiting technology for more robust and meaningful learning and teaching has invoked messianic responses from the language education community. Yet to be explored are teachers’ pedagogical choices based on the perceived technological affordances as well as interactions between teacher and student agency mediated by these affordances in the ecology of a classroom. This qualitative case study adopts an ecological approach, aiming to address rather than factor out the broader social context in a physical classroom. With data collected from 30 hours of classroom observation and 10 post-observation interviews with the participant teacher, the study makes an attempt to show how the ecological model of language learning can provide a theoretical lens through which to explore teachers’ practices of CALL that aim to encourage learner agency. The analysis centers on three focused extracts that illustrate interaction between and among the affordance of technology, the teacher participant’s pedagogical considerations, and her goal of encouraging learner agency. The result of the study emphasizes the teacher’s role from an ecological perspective and classroom learner agency mediated by technology, which provides useful insight that can contribute to language teaching practice with technology in the classroom.

Bullying has become an increasingly grave social problem in Korea and, as such, researchers have attempted to identify the various factors involved in bullying, along with victimisation experiences, in adolescents. However, previous research has often been fragmentary, examining only the individual, family or school factors, thereby failing to take an ecological perspective that can provide a more in-depth understanding of the behaviour involved in bullying. Moreover, such studies often view bullying as a single type of behaviour rather than one composed of different subtypes that may have different causes. Therefore, this study examined the long-term effects of individual, family and school factors on bullying and victimisation experiences from a sample of 3,449 middle school students. Logistic regression analyses were employed in order to understand how various ecological factors influence youth bullying and victimisation experiences. The findings supported the hypothesis, which noted that the key factors varied with regard to the bullying and victimisation subtypes. Lastly, implications and future directions are discussed.

The effect of a large scale oil spill disaster on the academic achievement and classroom behavior of children and adolescents who lived on the Galician coast (Spain) is studied from an ecological perspective. 430 participants divided into three age groups of 5, 10, and 15 years of age, were studied. The participants came from three areas differently affected by the disaster. Dependent variables were academic achievement and classroom behavior of the participants after the Prestige disaster. Degree of exposure and other protective or risk factors were investigated as well. Repeated measures ANOVA to assess the main effects of the oil spill and hierarchical regression analyses to assess the contribution of the protective/vulnerability factors were performed.

The results indicate that the effects of the disaster were relatively scarce. Some protective factors accounted for a certain degree of variance of different schoolroom behaviors. These results point to the intervention of protective factors in the adaptation to the disaster.