Emerging Scholar Best Article Award, 2015

The editors of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence are delighted to announce the 2015 recipient of its Emerging Scholar Best Article Award. The Journal presents the award to the article’s lead author, who must be an ‘‘emerging scholar’’ (i.e., an untenured researcher, such as a graduate student, post-doctoral scholar, research scientist, or assistant professor). The recipient of the award is selected by a random group of editorial board members who evaluate manuscripts’ innovative and substantive contributions to the empirical understanding of adolescence. In addition to receiving the recognition from colleagues, the winner receives a financial award generously provided by Springer, the journal’s publisher. The 2015 winner is Paul A. Chase, for his article entitled ‘‘Academic achievement in the high school years: The changing role of school engagement’’, which was co-authored with Lacey J. Hilliard, G. John Geldhof, Daniel J. A. Warren, and Richard M. Lerner (Chase et al. 2014). His study developed a tripartite—behavioral, emotional, and cognitive—model of school engagement to assess the relationship between school engagement and academic success among high school students. His analyses used data from the 4-H study of positive youth development, which in this instance followed 710 youth (69 % female) from Grades 10 to 12. The results revealed that the components of school engagement and academic achievement were mutually predictive and that these predictions varied from grade to grade. Overall, behavioral engagement emerged as the strongest predictor of achievement, leading the authors to conclude that ‘‘the best approach for capitalizing on the reciprocal relations between school engagement and academic achievement’’ may be ‘‘initiatives that promote intrinsic motives for behavioral engagement, coupled perhaps, at least initially, with extrinsic incentives for such engagement’’ (Chase et al. 2014, p. 894). Given that the journal publishes 12 issues per year, each typically containing up to 15 manuscripts, the editors view the award as a considerably distinctive accomplishment. Each of the issues has multiple articles authored by emerging scholars. The selection of articles for the award involves a two-step process, with the first round involving the selection of the strongest articles from each issue and the second round involving another group of editors who rank the selected articles. As in prior years (see Levesque 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014), the process resulted in a pool of very impressive articles. Unlike prior years, the initial round resulted in having one of the journal issues creating a tie between two authors, Madan et al. (2014) and Young (2014). A look at their work reveals why the selection committee was impressed. The articles selected as potential winners addressed a variety of important topics that reflect the journal’s commitment to better understanding adolescent development from contextual perspectives. Some of the articles focused on a variety of influences on developmental outcomes, such as ethnicity/race (Killoren and Deutsch 2014; Williams et al. 2014; Moilanen et al. 2014), genetics (Newsome and Sullivan 2014), media (Scull et al. 2014; Madan et al. 2014) and social networks, particularly peers (Sentse et al. 2014; Caravita et al. 2014; Garnett et al. 2014). In doing so, the studies focused on a variety of outcomes, including academic success (Godfrey and Grayman 2014; Chase et al. 2014) and a variety of risk behavior, including selfharm (Hamza and Willoughby 2014) as well as violence, delinquency and substance use (Sentse et al. 2014; Garnett & Roger J. R. Levesque rlevesqu@indiana.edu