Drawing on data from a longitudinal cohort‐sequential project, the present study examined developmental trajectories of adolescents’ attitudes toward political engagement and their willingness to participate in politics from grade 7 to 11 while accounting for the influence of school track and gender. Moreover, stabilities on the dependent variables were assessed. The results revealed differential trajectories regarding adolescents’ educational level. Increases were mainly shown for students attending the college‐bound school track. Generally, both orientations toward political behaviors were shown to become more stable throughout the adolescent years. Together, the findings confirmed adolescence to be a crucial period in life concerning the emergence, consolidation, and development of political points of view.

This study focuses on processes involved in students' academic self-concept constructions before, during, and after secondary school transition. The study is based on a four-wave longitudinal dataset (N = 1953). Structural equation modeling showed that during school transition, the impact of grades on students' academic self-concepts in Math and English decreased whereas the effects of maternal competence perceptions increased. After the transition, the effects of grades increased, while the effects maternal competence beliefs decreased again. The results are interpreted in terms of differential emphasizing of sources of information for students' self-concept construction. During school transition, elementary school grades lost informational value for selfevaluations due to the changed frame of reference. To secure stable and valid selfassessments, students emphasized other sources than grades; in this, case information obtained through parental competence appraisals. After transition, when valid grades were available for the students' constructions again, the temporarily heightened parental influence decreased again.

The school has been described as an important socialization agent in the process of political development. But the mechanism concerning how school contributes to political development has rarely been investigated. In this study we focus on contextual variables, i.e., classroom climate indicators that are seen as important aspects of the context in which adolescent development takes place. The study was based on the total of 1312 German students. In multilevel analyses, we regressed students’ reports on intolerant attitudes towards foreigners on background characteristics as well as on the perceived classroom climate. Fairness in the classroom as perceived by the individual student was found to be negatively related to intolerance and achievement pressure was positively related. Students attending the high college‐bound track reported less antiforeigner attitudes as did students where parents had a more sophisticated educational background. The results are discussed proposing schools to provide an open climate as a contextual framework for the development of tolerant attitudes among adolescents.

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In this study, we investigate the extent to which achievement-related feedback in two academic domains (mathematics and language) originating from two contexts (school and family) predicts early adolescents' domain-specific academic self-concept and intrinsic task values in Germany (N = 1,190, age range 10-13) and the United States (N = 1,953, age range 10-14). We examined the mediating role of both parents' competence perceptions and the early adolescents' academic self-concepts linking grades and intrinsic value. Within-and cross-domain effects were tested at each stage of the mediation. As predicted, in both countries the associations of grades with the academic self-concepts are mediated by the parents' competence perceptions. The association of academic feedback with intrinsic task value is mediated through the students' academic self-concepts.Early adolescents' academic development is influenced by various sources. In this study, we investigate the possible influence of the achievementrelated feedback provided by the school and parents on the academic self-concept and subjective task value. In early adolescence, a lot of changes take place. For instance, during secondary school transition, the feedback structures and frames of references in the school context change tremendously (for an overview see Wigfield, Eccles, Schiefele, Roeser, & Davis-Kean, 2006). As a consequence, academic beliefs and values have to be restructured (e.g., Cole et al., 2001;Eccles, 1993;Watt, 2004). Developmentalists have argued that transitions offer a unique opportunity to study developmental change because individuals experience many changes. Ruble (1994) argued that at these times of major transition there is an increased need for external information about own competencies in order to adapt to new context characteristics. Therefore, early adolescents should be more susceptible to contextual feedback during this time of an ecological transition (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) than in times of stable beliefs and values, for instance after the transition (Cole et al., 2001). Parents and academic grades are two common sources of such information at this developmental period.One of the most influential theoretical approaches to the development of academic beliefs is the expectancy-value model (EVM) of Eccles and colleagues (e.g., Eccles, 2005) that suggests that achievementrelated choices are influenced most directly by subjective task values (intrinsic, utility, and attainment values, and costs) and expectancies of success. In turn, task values are hypothesized to be influenced by the individual's general self-schemas, such as academic self-concept, as well as socializers' beliefs and behaviors. Moreover, the socializers' beliefs and behaviors as well as the students' academic experiences should also affect the academic self-concept. This study is based on these hypotheses (see Figure 1).In particular, we investigate how early adolescents' development of academic self-concepts and intrinsic task values is associated with achieve-