To promote independent reading in middle school, teachers must understand why adolescents choose to read or not read a specific book. Yet, there is limited research on the factors that students consider when evaluating books that teachers have introduced them to in class. This study aimed to describe factors that 43 Grade 7 and 8 students noted as…

This case study examined how a 14-year-old youth and eighth-grade student named Kendra (pseudonym) mobilized restorying to (re)center her experiences in horror fiction. I asked how she conceptualized horror and monstrosity in a 6-week English language arts unit, and how she (re)centered her life experiences within horror fiction through restorying…

This embedded-single case study aims to evaluate the efficacy of the 8th-grade music curriculum through the lens of Eisner's Educational Connoisseurship and Criticism Model. An initial survey involving 146 music teachers was conducted to determine the middle school grade-level music curriculum for evaluation. Subsequently, 15 music teachers, six…

Middle school social studies teachers are increasingly working on argument writing in their classrooms so that students can successfully write counterarguments that acknowledge competing perspectives about historical and social issues by the end of eighth grade. The authors' prior research indicates that eighth-grade students "can" grow…

In this research, it is aimed to examine the perceptions of artwork of middle school 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade students within the scope of Art Criticism and Aesthetics learning field acquisitions in the Visual Arts Curriculum. This research is a qualitative research and was designed in the general survey model, which is one of the descriptive…

This study investigates the multimodal construction of blame attributions in peer interaction during digital tasks in English as a Foreign Language classrooms. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis (CA), we examine how the force of blamings is manifested in and through the variety of resources used, and the role of digital devices in the…

To engage in critical praxis, teachers of literary response writing need concepts and methods for understanding the efficacy of teaching practices in helping students develop particular dispositions towards texts and the social issues they represent. In this article, the author uses concepts from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) and Systemic…

This paper examines the impact of the informational value of feedback choices on students' performance, their choice to revise, and the time they spend designing posters and reading feedback in an assessment game. Choices to seek confirmatory or critical feedback and to revise posters in a poster design task were collected from a hundred and six…

This article explores student empowerment in a restructured urban Title I middle school. The study includes data from eight participants in an action research project that involved a critical inquiry unit in an eighth-grade language arts class that asked students, "How are you empowered and disempowered by school?" Findings reveal that…

In an effort to expose students to a wide array of 21st century literacies, it is easy for teachers to forget the equally important role of leading students in critical inquiry regarding "when" and "why" particular media ought to be used. This results in students who possess knowledge of how to use a medium but lack the wisdom to truly understand…

This paper explores how students, as multimodal storytellers, can weave powerful narratives blending modes, genres, artefacts and literary conventions to represent the real and imagined in their lives. Part of a larger ethnographic case study of student writing in a middle years class for immigrant students learning English as an additional…