This article examines teaching strategies to empower metacognition through dance writing and collaborative dance making based on a project for middle school dance students at a Title I middle school during the Fall of 2020. This project draws on theoretical frameworks of critical pedagogy, intersectionality, and educational constructivism. Based…

School sense of belonging is critical for students' academic achievement and emotional well-being. The development of a sense of school belonging is influenced by direct and indirect factors within the school environment. Categorization into low and high achievement groups based on academics is a process largely outside the direct control of a…

This study is an exploration of how U.S. middle school students interacted with different topics in world history, and how their specific understandings of topics were connected to both sociocultural and instructional contexts. I observed two world history classrooms in a Midwestern Catholic school for 10 months and conducted task-based group…

"Papel y lápiz" (Paper and pencil) is the result of a qualitative research project carried out using the Participatory Action Research (PAR) as a model. "Papel y lapiz" seeks to teach young people and children, who are identified as being at high social risk, in 35 different public educational institutions (PEIs) from Cartagena…

Political polarization in the United States has made many environmental issues strongly partisan, with Democrats largely receptive to environmental messaging and Republicans commonly pitted against it. This phenomenon may have meaningful implications for how environmental education is conducted for people from different sociopolitical contexts. We…

In the United States, the two main political parties, Democrats and Republicans, have become increasingly polarized, including with regard to environmental issues. As part of a national study of environmentally focused single-day field trips for early adolescent youth in 2018, we conducted exploratory research to examine how outcomes differed for…

Derived from the Expectancy-Value Theory (EVT) model, cost has drawn scholarly interest for being predicative of avoidance motivation. The study is an effort to develop and validate an instrument to measure students' perceived costs in physical education. Through literature review and student interviews, a draft of 39 items under seven domains was…

The purpose of the current study was to extensively investigate not only bystander roles but also individual bystanders' moral emotional responses in the context of cyberbullying based on the perpetrator's perceived popularity and the message type. Data from 566 adolescents in grade 7 attending six middle schools in South Korea were used to…

Background/Context: Research suggests that sexual harassment and assault are distressingly common occurrences in middle school settings. However, prevention efforts have largely focused on secondary and post-secondary settings. While research-based initiatives to discuss consent could be effective, currently there is a dearth of literature on…

Although school violence statistics indicate that schools are safe places, anxiety over school shootings continues to influence school safety reform to the extent that security measures in American public schools include the arming of schoolteachers. Furthermore, not only have youths' perceptions of school security been relatively unexplored,…

The purpose of this sequential mixed methods study was to examine the relationship between classroom climate and student achievement of middle school students. A purposeful sample of 428 middle school students (6th-8th grade) from a large southeastern Texas school district were administered the "Learning Environment Inventory" (LEI) to…

Sexual harassment is a common experience among middle and high school students across the United States. Being the target of and even witnessing sexual harassment is associated with a number of negative consequences for adolescents. This study sought to explore early adolescent boys' and girls' reasoning about (a) perpetrating sexual harassment…

This study investigated gender disparities in students' science motivational beliefs, conceptualized as self-concept and intrinsic value, from Grades 4 to 8 in 22 countries. The gender-specific relation between science motivational beliefs and achievement was also scrutinized. Data from the 2011 and 2015 national cohorts of the Trends in…

Little attention has focused on how adolescents' perceptions of the pressure to be popular or socially preferred from parents, friends, and the media influence their engagement in face-to-face and cyber aggressive and prosocial behaviors. The present study examined these relationships among 857 seventh graders (M age = 12.19; 50.8% girls) from…

Framed by theories of youth, culture, identity studies, and literacy identity formation, this article examines how youth articulate themselves as writers. Using interview transcripts, analysis explored writing identity from the perspective of teens in urban, suburban, and rural settings. Findings from this qualitative study suggest that youth used…