Young adolescents entering high school look forward to having more choices and making new and more friends; however, they also are concerned about being picked on and teased by older students, having harder work, making lower grades, and getting lost in a larger, unfamiliar school. For middle school students, including those who have been labeled…

Research has shown a decline in motivation and performance for many children as they move from elementary school into middle school; however, research has also shown that the nature of motivational change on entry to middle school depends on characteristics of the learning environment in which students find themselves. This Digest outlines some…

This book explains how fears, anxiety, and stress develop in children, and how they can learn to successfully cope with these factors. It offers specific activities designed to assist in coping with a particular aspect of fear or stress. Part I, "Overview of Fears and Stress," contains activities to complement the various curricular…

Research has shown a decline in motivation and performance for many children as they move from elementary school into middle school; however, research has also shown that the nature of motivational change on entry to middle school depends on characteristics of the learning environment in which students find themselves. This Digest outlines some…

This guide provides information about how middle schools can promote the development and education of adolescents, especially about how they can focus students' attention on career opportunities and training. It also offers families some ideas about how they can encourage their children's career awareness, and it presents some criteria for parents…

Summarizing the wealth of recent research on sentence combining as an effective method of teaching students to tighten and vary their written sentences, this booklet explains how and why sentence combining works. The first half of the booklet provides background information on sentence combining, exploring the basis for the claim that sentence…

Designed as part of the Life Centered Career Education Curriculum, the book describes activities for use with elementary and middle school students with and without disabilities. The Life Centered Career Education Curriculum organizes 22 major competencies and 102 subcompetencies into three domains: daily living skills, personal-social skills, and…

The primary intent of this book is to provide a hands-on resource for educators in an effort to help all students with their plans after high school. A second purpose is to provide educators with insights about what is occurring in our schoolssuch as the lack of coordinated career guidance services, the number of disengaged students, and the…

Even though middle schools are important in retaining at-risk students, the organization and curriculum of most of them do not meet the developmental needs of young adolescents. Improvements should focus on making middle and junior high schools function less like large, impersonal high schools and more like caring, nurturing elementary schools,…

This guide is meant to aid teachers and parents with explanations and activities that they can use to help students understand and clarify their use of English. The guide discusses, for example: how language develops and grows; how to use a dictionary to answer questions; how words have formed in the past and continue to form; changing the content…

Offering a fresh perspective on making writing meaningful in every classroom, this guide seeks to help the teacher and the parent encourage the student writer as a thinker, not merely as a producer of a paragraph. The guide offers guidance as well as many practical activities that will help students to: organize the mind; play with ideas; find…

Reviewed is a computer software package entitled "Audubon Wildlife Adventures: Grizzly Bears" for Apple II and IBM microcomputers. Included are availability, hardware requirements, cost, and a description of the program. The murder-mystery flavor of the program is stressed in this program that focuses on illegal hunting and game…

Describing the physical, social, psychological, and human context of middle and secondary schools, this book is designed to help new teachers negotiate the environment of the schools in which they find themselves. The book is intended for first-year or second-year teachers, education majors in their final year of preparation, "second…

Problem solving has long been a concern of science educators, with many asserting that problem solving should be both the overriding method and valued outcome of science instruction in American schools. This information bulletin synthesizes studies that deal with the relationships between the teaching of problem solving and secondary school…

This brief paper summarizes guidelines for adapting instruction for advanced learners in inclusive, mixed-ability middle school classrooms. A rationale for differentiating instruction is followed by consideration of what differentiation is and is not. Characteristics of a differentiated class are enumerated, including: instruction is concept…