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Background: The promotion of healthy behaviors is a relevant issue worldwide, especially among adolescent populations, as this is the developmental stage where most unhealthy behaviors become ingrained. Purpose: The aim of this study was to analyze the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the Adolescent Health Promotion Scale (AHPS) in a Chilean sample of early adolescents. Methods: The sample was composed of 1,156 adolescents aged 10–14 years from schools in San Felipe, Chile. Item structure was assessed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses; reliability was measured using Cronbach’s alpha; and differences in terms of gender, age, and socioeconomic status (SES) were established using analysis of variance. Results: The analyses of item structure identified all of the six original factors (nutrition behaviors, health responsibility, social support, life appreciation, stress management and exercise behavior) as significant. However, eight items did not fit the Chilean population well. Therefore, the AHPS in Chile has been reduced to 32 items. The Cronbach’s alpha of the 32-item Chilean AHPS was .95, with the subscale coefficients ranging from .76 to .94. In addition, female subjects performed better than male subjects, and individuals of higher SES scored higher than the middle and lower socioeconomic groups. No differences on AHPS scores were found in different age groups. Conclusions: The AHPS appears to have good psychometric properties in terms of item structure and reliability. Consistent with studies carried out in other countries, health promotion behavioral differences were observed in association with gender and SES. The results support the Chilean version of the AHPS as an appropriate instrument for measuring the health promotion behaviors of early adolescents in Chile and for comparing results with those from other countries.

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Writing is a task that involves high cognitive and linguistic demands. This difficulty is increased with written academic texts; therefore, students need to learn the specific language to produce different discursive genres. The purpose of this research is to analyze the quality of writing of explanations and arguments produced by Chilean students. 153 Chilean 8th graders of three schools with different socioeconomic levels (high, medium and low-medium) produced an explanation and argument on the same topic (using tablets). The results revealed that students' writing show a basic level of achievement in both tasks. Non-parametric analysis were performed to determine the statistical differences according to task and socioeconomic levels. Regarding the differences, the Wilcoxon test shows a similar distribution in explanations and argumentation. However, significant differences are observed in the textual productions regarding the socioeconomic levels with Kruskal-Wallis test. Likewise, the development of ideas shows a low performance, therefore, an explicit intervention for improving this dimension is suggested. This study shows the relevance of assessing and teaching writing according to the characteristics of each task rather than focusing on general communicative skills, since this can be an effective use of language.