Similar themes are found among the psychological, social, and cognitive competencies needed by students who face challenges, such as low-income and minority, English language learner, immigrant, disabled, disconnected, foster, and sexual minority youth. may be a different emphasis within the competency across fields. The competencies were then organized into developmental domains, described below. This structure makes it easier to perceive the intersection of each field's recommendations, as well as to see some surprising gaps.

that conceptualizes elements of well-being relevant for the middle childhood period, identifies potential constructs and develops criteria for indicators. Here, we follow up by identifying a set of 20 indicator constructs, half positive and half negative. Of these 20, half measure child well-being and half measure contexts that affect child development. For each construct, we discuss evidence of importance and provide, where possible, examples of measures from US surveys. Keywords Middle childhood . Measures BackgroundConsiderable development occurs during middle childhood; in fact, some suggest that middle-childhood characteristics may more strongly predict future outcomes than do preschool indicators (Collins 1984). Moreover, considerable research connects behavior problems during the teen years to experiences and development during the elementary school years (Huston and Ripke 2006b). However, it cannot be presumed that the trends and patterns for middle childhood 1 mirror the patterns for older or younger children. Therefore, a comprehensive set of indicators appropriate to middle childhood is necessary in order to track how consecutive cohorts of children are faring in the context of changing policy, economic, and social environments, and in order to identify whether some subgroups of children are faring Child Ind Res (2008) 1:129-155

Using a Seeded Sample to Measure Response among Homeschooling Households Estimates of the size of the homeschooling population derived from government-sponsored surveys have been questioned because of concerns that homeschooling families may be less willing to participate in government studies. To estimate whether the response propensity of homeschooling households differs from that of non-homeschooling households, a sample of likely homeschooling households was seeded in a federal education survey. Cases in the seeded sample were treated to the same field procedures as the survey's sample to allow comparisons of the two samples' response patterns. While the seeded sample is an excellent method, in theory, for examining response propensity, the study revealed significant practical problems in implementing the study.