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Toward a psychology of positive youth development

TLDR
This article analyzes the development of initiative as an exemplar of one of many learning experiences that should be studied as part of positive youth development.
Abstract
This article analyzes the development of initiative as an exemplar of one of many learning experiences that should be studied as part of positive youth development. The capacity for initiative is essential for adults in our society and will become more important in the 21st century, yet adolescents have few opportunities to learn it. Their typical experiences during schoolwork and unstructured leisure do not reflect conditions for learning initiative. The context best suited to the development of initiative appears to be that of structured voluntary activities, such as sports, arts, and participation in organizations, in which youths experience the rare combination of intrinsic motivation in combination with deep attention. An incomplete body of outcome research suggests that such activities are associated with positive development, but the developmental processes involved are only beginning to be understood. One promising approach has recorded language use and has found that adolescents participating in effective organizations acquire a new operating language that appears to correspond to the development of initiative.

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Journal ArticleDOI

Positive psychology: An introduction.

TL;DR: The authors outline a framework for a science of positive psychology, point to gaps in the authors' knowledge, and predict that the next century will see a science and profession that will come to understand and build the factors that allow individuals, communities, and societies to flourish.
Journal ArticleDOI

School Engagement: Potential of the Concept, State of the Evidence

TL;DR: The concept of school engagement has attracted increasing attention as representing a possible antidote to declining academic motivation and achievement as mentioned in this paper, and it is presumed to be malleable, responsive to contextual features, and amenable to environmental change.
Book

Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives

Shadd Maruna
TL;DR: Maruna as discussed by the authors argues that to truly understand offenders, we must understand the stories that they tell - and that in turn this story-making process has the capacity to transform lives, and provides a fascinating narrative analysis of the lives of repeat offenders who, by all statistical measures, should have continued on the criminal path but instead have created lives of productivity and purpose.
Journal ArticleDOI

Changes in Children’s Self-Competence and Values: Gender and Domain Differences across Grades One through Twelve

TL;DR: The most striking finding across all domains was that self-perceptions of competence and subjective task values declined as children got older, although the extent and rate of decline varied across domains.
Journal ArticleDOI

The benefits of playing video games

TL;DR: This article summarizes the research on the positive effects of playing video games, focusing on four main domains: cognitive, motivational, emotional, and social, and proposes some candidate mechanisms by which playing videoGames may foster real-world psychosocial benefits.
References
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Book

Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior

TL;DR: This chapter discusses the development of Causality Orientations Theory, a theory of personality Influences on Motivation, and its application in information-Processing Theories.
Book

The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present an analysis of knowledge in everyday life in the context of a theory of society as a dialectical process between objective and subjective reality, focusing particularly on that common-sense knowledge which constitutes the reality of everyday life for the ordinary member of society.
Book

Handbook of Child Psychology

William Damon
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the importance of biology for human development and the role of the human brain in the development of human cognition and behavior, and propose a model of human development based on the Bioecological Model of Human Development.
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Trending Questions (1)
Which factors are crucial for an initiative to be effective?

The factors crucial for an initiative to be effective are intrinsic motivation, deep attention, and the ability to regulate psychological states and actions over time.