A school social work intervention called the "Getting Better Phenomenon" is redesigned as a curriculum resource for eighth- and ninth-grade teachers. The activities in the curriculum represent a synergy of provincial learning expectations; academic assessment and evaluation structures; teacher-guided delivery of student-generated "course" content;…

In this article, a heterogeneous latent growth curve model for modeling heterogeneity of growth rates is proposed. The suggested model is an extension of a conventional growth curve model and a complementary tool to mixed growth modeling. It allows the modeling of heterogeneity of growth rates as a continuous function of latent initial status and…

The study presents the frequencies of students' conceptions of growth and cell division before and after one hour of instruction. The investigation supplements qualitative results by directing attention to those conceptions which might occur most frequently to students: teachers can then concentrate their preparation on practical requirements. A…

As part of compliance with with the federal No Child Left Behind Act, this document presents the State Report Card of Arizona for 2009-2010. The report card provides tables relating to percentage of students who passed AIMS in Arizona by subject and grade. The tables shown in this document include: (1) Mathematics Grade 3; (2) Reading Grade 3; (3)…

This article describes an investigation making connections between the time on an analog clock and the angle between the minute hand and the hour hand. It was posed by a middle school mathematics teacher. (Contains 8 tables and 6 figures.)

Building and racing mousetrap cars is a common activity in many eighth- and ninth-grade physical science classrooms. However, once students have raced their cars, most mousetrap assignments come to an end. In this article, the authors developed a project to help teachers get more mileage out of mousetrap cars. The Mousetrap Car Project addresses…

Using children's picture books, Deborah Dean provided frameworks for student research papers that avoided the pitfalls leading to voiceless an encyclopedic writing. Research guide sheets; class analysis of text organization, sentence variety, stylistic choices; and peer review all contribute to interesting final papers. (Contains 2 figures.)

Judgments about the quality of students' experience of school generally focus on their academic performance and indeed this is an important indicator but closer attention needs to be paid to equally important, more broadly based outcomes that include social/emotional adjustment as they also are shown to impact on students' lives at, and beyond…

Although researchers report that motivational variables, such as interest and self-efficacy, positively relate to forms of achievement (e.g., standardized test scores, grades, number of problems solved correctly), other studies indicate that motivation's contribution to achievement is not consistent. Fewer studies, however, have examined these…

If strong school library media centers (SLMCs) positively impact middle school student reading achievement, as measured on standardized tests, are they also beneficial for middle school science achievement? To answer this question, the researcher built upon the statistical analyses used in previous school library impact studies with qualitative…

Eight hundred and ninety-nine (431 male, 467 female and one missing value) Grade 8 and 9 (n = 184 and 713, respectively, with two missing values) learners from secondary schools in Mpumalanga completed a science and mathematics questionnaire. Student's t tests showed that male and female, as well as language groups' scores, differed significantly.…

The annual event dropout rate describes the proportion of students who leave school each year without completing a high school program. The event dropout rates for the school year 2004-2005 of 1.68% for grades 7 through 12th and 2.40% for grades 9 through 12th are at the lowest levels in the past ten years. The event completion/graduation rate…

The main goal of this report is to present evidence on the predictive validity of an English language arts (ELA) performance assessment (PA) administered in Grades 2-9 in a large urban school district. To account for the hierarchical structure of the data (students are nested within schools), we employed hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to…

The connection between out-of-school activities and school engagement was examined in 140, 6th through 9th grade African American adolescents. Youth's out-of-school activities were measured with a series of 7 nightly phone calls and focused on time in structured (homework, academically-oriented, extracurricular/sports) and unstructured (watching…

The Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) underscore both the mandate and the challenge of assuring that English Language Learners (ELLs) achieve the same high standards of performance that are expected of their native English speaking peers. The intent indeed is laudable: states, districts, schools, and teachers…