In 1993 Lake Agassiz School in North Dakota received a Knight Foundation grant so teachers and students could participate in a program to learn how to create an opera. The program instructed teachers on how students could maximize their understanding about producing an opera. The school formed a partnership with the Metropolitan Opera Guild of New…

This collection of activities is designed to show how graphics display calculators can be used to foster algebraic thinking in middle school students. The collection consists of five activities addressing such topics as functions, estimation and scatterplots, and patterns. Blackline masters for the activities are included. (MM)

Intended for middle school instructors or teacher education students in middle school methods courses, this guide provides a practical, concise, criterion-referenced, performance-based mastery learning model for effective teaching. The guide is organized around four components: why the rationale to support the components that follow; what the…

Science 101 was designed by a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional team, with leadership from the Departments of Biology and Teacher Education, and participation by faculty in the Departments of Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics, the College of Engineering, and master teachers from school districts in the state of Illinois. Their goal was to…

This two part curriculum includes a student's guide and a teacher's guide designed to help upper-elementary and middle school students better understand violence and work to prevent it in the schools and community. Developing violence prevention plans will help students express their ideas about solutions to violence and will help students examine…

This workbook presents activities for training middle school student peer listeners. The first of the workbook's 10 chapters contains an introduction to peer listening. Activities include a pretest on a series of true-false statements called the "Peer Listening Inventory," defining the meaning of the words that describe the qualities of a peer…

This folktale unit supports 6th- through 8th-grade students exploration of the many subgenres of folktales: trickster tales, fairy tales, fables, tall tales, and legends. The unit focuses heavily on the use of technology as a learning tool as students work together to create WebQuests for their peers to explore. During the 10 one-hour sessions,…

This study investigated the differential effects of two direct instruction (DI) reading programs, one with overt decoding strategies and one with more covert decoding strategies, on the reading achievement of struggling seventh graders in an urban middle school. The students participating in this study (N = 55) were 2 to 4 years behind in reading…

This study extended the work on curriculum-based measurement to examine the criterion-related validity of curriculum-based measures in written expression for middle school students, the differences in validity coefficients for various lengths of text, and the sensitivity of curriculum-based measures to change in student performance.…

"Conversations With Principals: Issues, Values, and Politics" is a unique compilation of interviews with principals at the elementary, middle, and secondary levels. Unlike any other text in Educational Administration, this book allows students the unusual opportunity to experience the inner voice of principals as they discuss the many…

Designed for use by junior high and middle school students, this annotated bibliography of over 1,100 titles of fiction and nonfiction also serves as a resource for teachers, librarians, and parents in search of titles that might catch the attention of such students. The bibliography presents annotations of books published or reissued in 1993 and…

This guide was designed to help middle school students plan career paths and make career choices. The booklet is organized in four sections, each intended to guide students in their career development process. The first section focuses on self-awareness as part of career exploration. The second section features five career clusters and related job…

This paper contains a variety of instructional strategies and a review of research related to different learning styles. A learning styles inventory, style profiles, and information regarding some types of activities for students with different learning styles are included. Two sample lesson plans introduce and describe the inductive learning…

Designed to expose young readers to a wide variety of literary genres, this annotated bibliography provides a list of over 500 recently published adolescent literature selections representative of the universal themes in literature. Selections are divided into sections of folklore, drama, poetry, non-fiction, and fiction (the most extensive). The…

This booklet, which was developed for use by Florida middle school students, contains basic information about career opportunities, educational and other requirements for various occupations, and educational and career planning. The first section, which is designed for students to share with their parents, discusses the importance of parent…