This report describes district-level results from the 2007-2008 AISD Student Climate Survey.

The Aplusix system has been designed for helping students to learn algebra. Its capacity to tell the students whether their calculations are correct or not, to provide families of exercises of a chosen level, and to give scores after tests allows this system to be used in the regular functioning of the class. Its capacity to record the students'…

"University of Chicago School Mathematics Project (UCSMP) Algebra," designed to increase students' skills in algebra, is appropriate for students in grades 7-10, depending on the students' incoming knowledge. This one-year course highlights applications, uses statistics and geometry to develop the algebra of linear equations and…

Physics First has gained momentum across the country. Providing a radically different paradigm to teaching science at the high school level, the Physics First movement inverts the traditional science sequence by teaching physics to ninth grade students. One of the benefits of this change, supporters claim, is that it provides a foundation to teach…

While school bullying in Japan, Ijime, has been a topic of major public concern since the 1980s, few qualitative studies have been conducted to examine its nature and correlates. Through a case study of 30 ninth graders in a Japanese middle school, the study found that Ijime has complex group dynamics in its onset and process. The analysis of…

During discussions about planning, Tim Kemp and Charlotte Bickmore recently concluded that despite the name they give to their major Year 8 unit (The Making of the United Kingdom), they tend mainly to focus on England, and even more especially, on London. They have a good point. Ask an average Year 8 student to describe Britain in, say, 1700, and…

Changes in early adolescents' self-reported cheating behaviors in mathematics before and after the transition from middle school to high school are examined. Students were surveyed in school regarding their cheating behaviors in math, and the motivational goal structures perceived in their math classrooms. Surveys were completed twice during the…

New 9th graders reflect on the worries they had as middle school students about moving into high school. They also suggest ways of easing the transition and providing support in 9th grade. Teens want teachers to connect middle school students regularly with high school students, give them more responsibility in middle school, and focus on…

Background: This longitudinal study examines the long-term effects on the achievement of students at a diverse suburban high school after all students were given accelerated mathematics in a detracked middle school as well as ninth-grade "high-track" curriculum in all subjects in heterogeneously grouped classes. Despite considerable…

In a study of the New Orleans public schools, African American males represented 43% of the school population, while accounting for 58% of the non-promotions, 65% of the suspensions, 80% of the expulsions, 43% of the dropouts, and only 9% of the gifted and talented. African American males are denied equal educational opportunity at such alarming…

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.)

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.)

Three decades of mounting academic and testing requirements are snagging growing numbers of students in the 9th grade. "The bulge" is the name education researchers give to the percentage increase in students in the 9th grade over the same period. This article reports on factors that might explain the growing 9th grade bottleneck and…

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…