Educators rely on a conglomeration of assessment instruments to appraise, measure, monitor, and document evidence of students' academic readiness, learning progressions, acquisition of interdisciplinary knowledge, and extensive educational needs. The Mississippi Academic Assessment Program for Mathematics (MAAP-M) and the i-Ready Assessment…

Academic performance of K-12 students in North America could be improved in that the majority of students produce undistinguished results in every international assessment of academic proficiency. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether student's self-discipline and parental involvement in student's academic activities have any impact…

The relationship between teaching and learning is a most central issue in education research, but it is yet to be fully understood. Variation Theory provides an explanatory account for teaching and learning and offers a specific view on what it means to learn: to discriminate and to discern critical aspects of the object of learning. This paper…

The goal of this article is to explore relations between adolescent values, interests in activities, and their bonding to school. This article presents survey research findings that examine 1,928 sixth- and seventh-grade students' responses to survey prompts about 15 terminal values adapted from Rokeach's (1973) theory of values, prompts about 11…

Given the increasing emphasis of communicative competence in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts and the lack of validation research on speaking assessments for adolescent EFL learners, in the current study we examined the validity of the TOEFL Junior® speaking test, a relatively new speaking assessment developed by Educational Testing…

Face-to-face and cyberbullying are associated with adverse behavioral or health problems. However, little is known about the association between multiple types of bullying and substance use. The current cross-sectional study compares the association among face-to-face and cyberbullying (bully-only, victim-only, bully/victim, non-involved) and…

Background: Many studies document associations between low health literacy (HL) and poor health behaviors and outcomes. Yet, HL is understudied among adolescents, particularly from underserved, rural communities. We targeted rural adolescents in this cross-sectional study and explored relationships between HL and (1) energy-balance-related health…

This study adopted a cross-sectional and correlational research design in an attempt to add our understanding of student- and teacher-level factors that help explain variability in students' science achievement to the existing literature. More specifically, the present article examined students' science achievement in relation to their…

This article describes the development and initial validation of a measure of middle school students' perspectives of culturally responsive teaching practices. The Student Measure of Culturally Responsive Teaching (SMCRT) was developed by modifying items on the Culturally Responsive Teaching Self-Efficacy (CRTSE), which measures teachers'…

To investigate relationships between students' quantitative reasoning with fractions and their algebraic reasoning, a clinical interview study was conducted with 18 middle and high school students. The students were interviewed twice, once to explore their quantitative reasoning with fractions and once to explore their solutions of problems…

This investigation examined social acceptance and popularity as correlates of perceived social reputations and perceived dyadic relationships in a cross-sectional sample of 418 6th and 7th grade students (approximate average age of 12 years). We assessed early adolescents' social status using peer nominations and measured their perceptions of…

Background: Whereas dating violence among high school students has been linked with sexual risk-taking and substance use, this association has been understudied among early adolescents. We estimated the prevalence of physical and nonphysical dating violence in a sample of middle school students and examined associations between dating violence,…

The present case study investigated the impact of a short-term summer literacy approach on writing performance and self-perception of writing for young adolescents of low-income families residing in urban housing projects. The approach offered intensive literacy engagement to offset summer achievement loss; assisted ethnic-minority, low…

Although researchers call for inquiry learning in science, science assessments rarely capture the impact of inquiry instruction. This paper reports on the development and validation of assessments designed to measure middle-school students' progress in gaining integrated understanding of energy while studying an inquiry-oriented curriculum. The…

In this study, we expand the Cohen and Ball triangle of interactions to explore the relationship of professional development to classroom practice. We consider a case study of one teacher's implementation of a task from professional development in her 7th grade classroom. We were specifically interested in how the content and pedagogy of the…