Ryoko Yamaguchi

Cultural Diversity, Student Motivation and Achievement

Achievement in one form or another has been a subject of continuing interest on the part of parents, leaders in business and industry, government officials and of course, social scientists. Some may focus especially on societal achievement: gross national product (GNP), industrial efficiency, or per capita income. Others are more concerned with the number of Nobel prizes won or perhaps the quality of orchestras, the status of the arts, employment rates, and literacy. Whatever the specific focus, in the final analysis, a society’s schools take the blame when productivity objectives are not met, science is second rate, and high art and music have to be imported. Whether or not schools deserve all the blame they receive, it is hard to deny that they are a major factor in societal achievement.

Children's emergent leadership: The relationships with group characteristics and outcomes

This study is focused on the relationships that children’s self-perceived emergent leadership shares with group characteristics, such as gender and ability groups, and with outcomes, such as performance and self-perceived group cohesion and regulation. Fourth-and fifthgrade students (N = 249) participated in a collaborative math activity, assessing their own leadership behaviors and perceptions of group cohesion and regulation. Utilizing hierarchical linear modeling, task- and relationship-focused leadership were positively associated with group regulation and group cohesion but were not related to group performance. Selfperceived task-focused emergent leadership was negatively associatedwith female-majority group compositions. Classroom implications are discussed.

Emergent leadership in small groups using computer-mediated communication

When small groups meet online, the communication channel they use may affect the emergent leadership styles that individuals attempt. We studied 66 three-person groups playing a social dilemma game and communicating via one of four channels: face-to-face, videoconference, audio conference, or Internet chatroom. We found that the narrower the channel, the less likely groups were to use relationship-focused leadership styles. We also found that for mixed-gender groups, lower levels of relationship-focused leadership led to poorer group performance on the cooperation task. The more autocratic task-focused leadership style was not inhibited by communication channel. Additional results are also given linking gender composition to choice of leadership style. The statistical technique used in this research, Hierarchical Linear Modeling is particularly useful for studying group work, and so is explained in some detail.

Relationships between School Drug Searches and Student Substance Use in U.S. Schools.

The purposes of this article are (a) to describe drug search policies in nationally representative samples of schools from 1998 to 2001 and (b) to examine the association between drug searches by schools and reported drug use by students. Most schools (86%) reported searching students for cause or suspicion, while 40% of schools reported randomly searching students. The use of drug searches differed according to school characteristics. For-cause drug searches were positively associated with 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-grade students’ 12-month illicit drug use, while random drug searches were associated (positively) only with 10th-grade students’ 12-month drug use.