Although studies suggest that coping is central to students’ learning and achievement, and open to influence from personal and interpersonal factors, research also paints a troubling picture of normative development: During primary school, students’ coping follows a constructive trajectory, but in early adolescence, maladaptive coping rises abruptly while adaptive strategies decline; and students do not fully recover from these losses by the end of the teenage years. To make sense of these trends, we argue for a systems conceptualization that defines coping as “action regulation under stress,” and embeds action in a larger multi-level coping system. To illustrate the utility of this approach, we explore five ways it can offer insights about how social partners and ecologies can foster the healthy development of students’ academic coping. We hope to contribute to a shift to more developmental and systems-oriented conceptualizations, which we believe can better inform intervention efforts and guide future study of the development of academic coping.

Dismantling systems of racial oppression requires that people from many different racial and ethnic backgrounds become critically conscious in challenging racial injustices. Youth’s pathways to critical consciousness may be very different depending on youth’s experiences with racial oppression and privilege. This chapter brings together relational developmental systems and critical race and intersectionality theories and existing research that can offer insights into different underpinnings and processes related to youth of color and white youth’s critical consciousness development. We also show how mapping complex variations in critical reflection, motivation, and action and situating these processes within contexts of oppression and privilege can advance understanding of critical consciousness development. We conclude by summarizing promising future directions for theory and research.

Which more importantly contributes to who we are and how we behave, biological influences or socio-cultural–environmental influences? This question reflects the essence of the “nature–nurture debate,” as traditionally defined. This debate and its appropriate resolution have important implications. At the same time, the nature–nurture debate is not profitably framed in this traditional way. The traditional framing implicitly assumes that “biological” and “environmental” causes – “nature” and “nurture” – constitute separable causes, as, say, pieces of a pie can be sliced apart and separated. In fact, they are not separable. To understand the effects of “nurture,” one must understand outcomes of “nature.” Within a reframing of the nature–nurture debate, one can ask a number of questions about the roles that nature and nurture play. We describe these questions. And we discuss some implications for understanding the sexes and, specifically, women.