Middle school students' behavior is an important dimension of high school readiness. Research has shown that academic achievement and academic behavior in middle school affect high school academic outcomes, high school persistence, and high school graduation. The academic behaviors that are important for success in middle school, high school, and…

This qualitative descriptive case study explored the perceptions of parents and teachers of the academic achievement gap in mathematics between African-American middle school males and their White counterparts. Ten parents, both African-American and White, with students attending middle school in the Cherokee County School District and 5 teachers…

Transition into the ninth grade has long been a critical juncture for students as they make the move to a larger environment with less personal support and a more rigorous academic challenge. In an effort to help make the move from middle-to-high-school transition as smooth as possible, school districts are using Ninth Grade Academies, or…

The author attempted to examine how Taiwanese junior high school students' perfectionistic tendencies and achievement goals were related to their academic burnout versus work engagement, and to determine differences in the indicators of burnout versus engagement among students with different subtypes of perfectionism. A total of 456 eighth-grade…

This article describes Bill Ferriter's efforts to incorporate cause-driven learning into his 6th-grade grade language arts and social studies classroom starting with Kiva (http://www.kiva.org), a microlending website that pairs interested lenders in the developed world with people in the developing world who are working to improve the quality…

This article proposes a model of student school engagement, comprising aspirations, belonging, and productivity. From this model, items for the Student School Engagement Measure (SSEM) were developed. The SSEM was validated with data from 396 eighth graders in an urban school district. Utilizing structural equation modeling, the second-order…

Despite many years of efforts to communicate new scientific knowledge to the public, surveys continue to suggest that many people remain uninformed about current scientific research (Miller, 2001; Miller, 2004) and fail to recognize how it can be relevant to their lives. There is continued need for investigation on improving methods for engaging…

This study investigated data from 5 high schools in West Tennessee. The study examined whether a ninth-grade transition program (i.e., the Ninth-grade Academy) had an effect on student achievement and engagement, which was measured by English I End-of-Course Test Scores, attendance rates, and dropout rates. All of the schools were treatment…

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of the English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) Student Service Learning (SSL) Club on academic and non-academic outcomes for students receiving ESOL services during 2012-2013 in six high schools in Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools (MCPS). The ESOL SSL Club convenes regularly…

The purpose of this case study was to determine to what extent e-readers affected struggling readers as a part of reading instruction at the middle school level to improve students' literacy skills of comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary, and to show how e-readers affected engagement and self-efficacy of struggling readers to read and use…

Although inquiry-based learning has been debated throughout the greater educational community and demonstrated with some effect in modern classrooms, little quantitative analysis has been performed to empirically validate sustained benefits. This quantitative study focused on whether inquiry-based pedagogy actually brought about sustained and…

The purpose of Science in Action (SIA) was to examine the relationship between implementing quality science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) service-learning (SL) projects and the effect on students' academic engagement in middle school science, civic responsibility, and resilience to at-risk behaviors. The innovative project funded by…

The number of middle level schools adopting 1:1 laptop programs has increased considerably during the past decade (e.g., Lowther, Strahl, Inan, & Bates, 2007; Storz & Hoffman, 2013; Texas Center for Educational Research, 2009). The cornerstone practices of the middle school concept (National Middle School Association, 2010), therefore,…

Many engineering and technology education classrooms incorporate simulation modeling as part of curricula to teach engineering and STEM-based concepts. The traditional method of the learning process has students first learn the content from the classroom teacher and then may have the opportunity to apply the learned content through simulation…

CAST created "Strategic Reader," a technology-based system blending Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) in a digital learning environment to improve reading comprehension instruction. This experimental study evaluates the effectiveness of Strategic Reader using two treatment conditions for measuring…