William Damon

What is Positive Youth Development

This article explores the recent approach to youth research and practice that has been called positive youth development. The author makes the case that the approach grew out of dissatisfaction with a predominant view that underestimated the true capacities of young people by focusing on their deficits rather than their developmental potentials. The article examines three areas of research that have been transformed by the positive youth approach: the nature of the child; the interaction between the child and the community; and moral growth. It concludes with the point that positive youth development does not simply mean an examination of anything that appears to be beneficial for young people. Rather, it is an approach with strong defining assumptions about what is important to look at if we are to accurately capture the full potential of all young people to learn and thrive in the diverse settings where they live.

The Development of Purpose During Adolescence

The field of psychology has been slow to recognize the importance of purpose for positive youth development. Until recently, purpose was understood, if at all, as a means of adapting to threatening conditions rather than as a motivator of good deeds and galvanizer of character growth. Moreover, in most psychological studies, purpose has been conflated with personal meaning, a broader and more internally oriented construct. This article offers a new operational definition of purpose that distinguishes it from meaning in an internalistic sense, and it reviews the existing psychological studies pertinent to the development of purpose during youth. The article identifies a number of urgent questions concerning how-and whether-young people today are acquiring positive purposes to dedicate themselves to and, if so, what the nature of todays youth purposes might be.

Critical distinctions among three approaches to peer education

Abstract Peer tutoring, cooperative learning, and peer collaboration are contrasted with one another along dimensions of equality and mutuality of engagement. It is argued that peer tutoring tends to foster dialogues that are relatively low on equality and varied in mutuality; cooperative learning foster ones that are relatively high in equality and low to moderate in mutuality; and peer collaboration fosters ones that are high in both. There are also some important variations in task and reward structure that cut across the three approaches. In general, the peer learning arrangements that seem most likely to generate productive instructional dialogues are those that encourage joint problem solving, that rely on intrinsic rather than extrinsic rewards, and that discourage competition between students.

Dispositions and Teacher Assessment: The Need for a More Rigorous Definition.

This article discusses the use of dispositions as a basis for evaluating candidates for teaching credentials. It begins with the assumption that any evaluation process must rely on clearly defined constructs that cannot be interpreted in open-ended ways to suit the subjective biases of the evaluator. It then argues that present uses of the disposition construct in teacher education risk this kind of biased application. It makes the point that fairness in assessment procedures requires rigorous and unambiguous definitions of assessment standards by criteria drawn from science and other systematic areas of scholarship. A definition of disposition drawn from the behavioral sciences is offered, and principles for using dispositions as a standard in teacher assessment are offered.

The Youth Charter: Towards the Formation of Adolescent Moral Identity.

Abstract Studies of adolescent conduct have found that both exemplary and antisocial behaviour can be predicted by the manner in which adolescents integrate moral concerns into their theories and descriptions of self. These findings have led many developmentalists to conclude that moral identity‐‐in contrast to moral judgement or reflection alone‐‐plays a powerful role in mediating social conduct. Moreover, developmental theory and research have shown that identity formation during adolescence is a process of forging a coherent and systematic sense of self. Despite these well‐founded conclusions, many moral education programmes fail to engage a young persons sense of self, focus exclusively on judgement and reflection and make little or no attempt to establish coherence with other formative influences in a young persons life. The authors propose a new method, called “the youth charter”, for promoting adolescent self‐identification with a coherent set of moral standards.

Bringing in a New Era in the Field of Youth Development

Professional fields that combine study and practice usually change gradually and only after stiff resistance. It took Western jurisprudence hundreds of years to move from a system of judicial fiat to verification through trial by juries of peers. Even in the face of managed care, medicine still clings (somewhat desperately) to models of clinical research and doctor-patient relations that have guided it for more than two millennia. Yet our own field of youth development has encountered nothing less than a sea change in a remarkably short period of time—a decade at most, barely the blink of an eye in a field’s history. All the more remarkable (considering the profound nature of the change), it has been a quiet revolution, with relatively little fanfare or conflict.

Education and Moral Commitment

Abstract This paper argues that most school‐based moral education programmes are limited by their exclusive focus on moral reflection and their neglect of moral habit, effect and commitment. In order to have a far‐reaching impact on young peoples moral conduct, schools must join with other institutions, including families, churches, youth programmes and other community organisations to provide a clear and coherent set of expectations for young people. The goals of this co‐operation across institutions should be to promote the development of responsible moral habits, mature moral reflection, a sense of self with moral concerns at the core and an integration of habit and reflection, morality and the self.

Civic Purpose: An Integrated Construct for Understanding Civic Development in Adolescence

This article introduces civic purpose as a construct for learning about civic development in adolescence. Civic purpose, defined as a sustained intention to contribute to the world beyond the self through civic or political action, integrates the components of motivation, civic activity, and future-oriented civic intention. We present results from a mixed methods longitudinal study that used the civic purpose framework in which 1,578 high school seniors took a survey, 50 participated in an interview, and 9 additional adolescent “civic exemplars” participated in both the survey and the interview. Two years later, 480 participants took the survey again, and 34 participated in a second interview. A small percentage of the study subjects exhibited full civic purpose across three different types of civic activity (political, community service, expressive), while a larger percentage demonstrated precursory forms of civic purpose, with evidence of some but not all components of civic purpose. Key contributors to the development of civic purpose were: identity salience, beliefs and values, and invitation from one or more adults.

The Development of Self-Understanding in Puerto Rico and the United States

A model of self-understanding development with four developmental levels is presented. The model allows for individual and cultural differences in the degree to which self-understanding at each of four developmental levels is focused on the physical, active, social, or psychological qualities of self. The value of the model for describing and contrasting development in different cultures was investigated by examining the self-understanding of two groups: 49 children and adolescents from a small fishing village in Puerto Rico, and a matched group from a large industrialized city in the mainland United States. The results indicated that relationships between age and developmental level were similar for the two groups. However, the orientations of self-understanding of individuals from Puerto Rico were more oriented towards the social qualities of the self, while the self-understanding of mainland United States subjects focused on the psychological qualities of self. The findings are discussed in terms of different patterns of socialization.

The Development of Justice and Self-Interest during Childhood

Anyone who spends time around young children eventually will encounter the ringing refrain of “That’s not fair!” Beginning as early as the preschool years, fairness plays a central role in every child’s social life. Particularly in its breach, it is a notion of which even young children are acutely aware. The outraged reaction of a 2-year-old to being denied a turn on a swing or a share of a cookie will attest to this early sense, at least as evoked in personally experienced injustices.