This article presents an authentic writing opportunity to help ninth-grade students use the writing process in a science classroom to write and illustrate picture books for fourth-grade students to demonstrate and share their understanding of a biology unit on cells. By creating a picture book, students experience the writing process, understand…

To celebrate a milestone in eighth-graders' lives--leaving middle school and moving on to high school--the author assigns them the "Coming of Age" project, which examines the big idea of identity and promotes the move from self-reflection to self-expression. The project also includes writing components that correspond to each of the nine…

A staggered A-B design study was used to evaluate the effects of Self- Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) instruction for quick writing in middle school science across four classrooms. A sixth-grade science teacher delivered all students' writing assessment and SRSD instruction for informative quick writing. Results indicated that performance…

Health educators in elementary and secondary schools should seek collaborations with teachers of other subjects to enhance health education curriculum. The strategy described in this article details a potential collaboration between health education and language arts units. The activity enhances both drug education knowledge gains and creative…

This descriptive study investigates the ways that students in an Ancient History class make meaning of past events by relating them to their present lives and experiences. The study is grounded in theories of historical thinking, particularly focusing on the concepts of presentism and its usefulness for examining classroom teaching. The following…

This paper presents the results of a one-year longitudinal study which sought to investigate the effect that strategy instruction may have on English language achievement. Two classes of junior high school students at Madina in Ghana were involved in an experiment. The experimental class was taught various language-learner strategies both…

A successful middle school team of teachers employed effective middle level philosophy to structure a curriculum around themes that were relevant, challenging, integrative, and engaging for their particular students and community. Realizing that their young adolescents were involved in tough, delicate issues in their out-of-school lives, the…

This article recounts what happened when one of the authors, a pre-service teacher, introduced a digital multimodal composition project in her 9th-grade inclusion English classes to support junior high students as they read the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird". Rather than regard new literacies as competing with print literacy for attention, the…

The purpose of this study was to look at elementary/middle school pre-service teachers' perceptions of multicultural and diversity issues through multicultural children's literature. Nineteen pre-service teachers in a foundation of literacy course explored multicultural children's literature and involved group/class discussions and a project over…

Art teachers are always looking for new ways to bring reading opportunities into the classroom--without just reading chapters in a textbook. This assignment helps broaden the knowledge of students in areas that teachers may not have time to explore during art classes. It also gives students something to work on if they have finished their project.…

As forty-six states and the District of Columbia implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), questions abound regarding implementation, including the implications for curriculum and pedagogy. In this report, researchers analyze what texts English teachers assign their students and the instructional techniques they used in the classroom. The…

The present article focuses on in situ social comparison among junior high school students. Rather than studying social comparison as an individual phenomenon in experimental situations, which has been common in previous research, the study analyzes social comparison as a real-life social practice. The results show that the practice of social…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how engagement, mood and number of assignments completed on computerized differentiated homework using an iPad in a one-to-one mobile device environment influenced the growth index and normalized gain in reading literature benchmark assessments of students in grades five, six, and seven. Furthermore,…

Over the last decade, the number of one-to-one laptop programs in U.S. schools has steadily increased. Though technology advocates believe that such programs can assist student writing, there has been little systematic evidence for this claim, and even less focused on the benefits of specific technology use by diverse learners. This dissertation…

To teach science writing effectively, scholars encourage combining writing to learn with applications of the science writing heuristic. How teachers learn to do so remains under-examined. This essay follows a cohort of ninth-grade science teachers who collaborated in a project to develop, test, and revise such a combination of writing prompts for…