Declining national assessment scores and continuous critiques of Common Core curricula have presented persistent challenges for stakeholders within the American education system. This study was an investigation of the existence of parallelism in five commonly used Common Core middle school mathematics curricula. An embedded mixed methods research…

The purpose of this paper was to examine current mathematics interventions designed for students in kindergarten through eighth grade to determine how often they incorporated the five strands of mathematical proficiency identified by the National Research Council (2001). The five strands are conceptual understanding, procedural knowledge,…

Adopting new instructional materials is an important way to support reform in science education, but implementation can be challenging and complex. Therefore, we conducted a contrasting case study of two middle schools implementing new curricular materials. We conducted semi-structured interviews with teachers and leaders and collected…

The problem addressed through this study is the inconsistent use of mathematics educational technology tools in middle school mathematics courses in the United States. The problem was important to address because inconsistent use of mathematics educational technology tools may impact student performance. The purpose of this basic qualitative study…

This exploratory study, in which the participants portrayed a critical role, aimed to discover the perceptions of professional development in changing educator practice at the secondary level with middle school teachers in an urban school district. The data collection process included semi-structured interviews with nine secondary teachers via…

Science teachers crave instructional materials and an increasing number of them are going to online educational marketplaces to purchase them. This study reports on a content analysis of highly rated products marketed for middle level science (grades 6, 7, and/or 8) on TeachersPayTeachers.com (TpT), one of the most prominent online educational…

Instructional program coherence, which refers to the consistency and stability of school-wide programs that are guided by a common instructional framework, constitutes a vital school improvement strategy. Since Newmann and colleagues, in their study of 2001, conceptualized and created a measure of instructional program coherence, much of the…

The adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) requires many teachers to drastically change their classroom instruction. Curricular materials offer a tool to support this transition, but there are questions about the degree to which available curricula truly reflect the shifts required by the NGSS. This study proposes a framework of…

This rubric was developed for the analysis of intervention programs against the criteria of implementing the four recommendations and accompanying action steps presented in the IES Practice Guide "Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4-9" for the Adolescent Literacy Intervention Selection Tool (A-LIST). Each item in…

Prior to the 2010 release of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM), the curricular landscape in the United States consisted of an assortment of individual state standards that as a collection reflected little consensus as to the grade placement of specific mathematical content. As CCSSM has now been used as the foundation for…

Previous research identifies instructional program coherence as a school condition that has positive effects on student performance. This study investigates how instructional program coherence (IPC) operates as a social mechanism that supports teachers' psychological needs. We hypothesized that IPC would be positively related to teacher perceived…

The work of teacher education in a 2020's context is challenging and filled with opportunity. With a diversifying P-12 student body (Love, 2020; Pitts, 2019) and the confluence of social, political, and educational factors (Nieto & Bode, 2018), the complexities of teacher education are vast and fluid. In a historical moment that has included…

Year 4 continued the Adolescent Literacy Intervention Selection Tool (A-LIST) development work from Year 3 and focused on reviewing the degree to which selected adolescent interventions support evidence-based recommendations. To inform that review, Region 1 Comprehensive Center (R1CC) and the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary…

Do you sometimes start to teach a mathematics concept and feel like you are staring at a sea of bewildered faces? What happens when you discover that students previously learned a calculation trick or a mnemonic that has muddied their long-term understanding? When "rules" seem to change from year to year, teacher to teacher, or school to…

In most middle schools, learning is segregated by discipline. Yet interdisciplinary approaches have been shown to cultivate creative thinking, support problem solving, and develop interest while supporting knowledge gains (NAE & NRC in STEM Integration in K-12 Education: Status, Prospects, and an Agenda for Research. National Academies Press,…