The middle level years are an important period of transition for adolescents. Middle level students have giant hearts--they want to save the world, and they are learning how to reach outside of themselves to empathize and care about others. At Millburn Middle School in New Jersey, where the author is principal, staff members found a way to help…

Only few studies have explicitly attended to the nature of the perceived underlying factors that prompt young adolescents' reflective thinking in association with K-12 learning environment. This paper focuses on an analysis of the factors that are perceived by young students as prompting their reflective thinking and how those factors apply to the…

Burgeoning research on the adolescent (e.g., middle-school) years suggests that this is a particularly vulnerable period for the development of maladaptive eating patterns. Prior research has established a link between perceptions of maternal parenting practices and adolescent onset of problematic eating behaviors. The authors hypothesized that…

Research finds that the availability of specific coping resources can alleviate the more harmful effects of stress among adolescents. Although studies have investigated the relationship between coping resources and various outcomes among general samples of youth, no research has focused on adolescents who report high personal standards in…

ProbLab is a probability-and-statistics unit developed at the Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern University. Students analyze the combinatorial space of the 9-block, a 3-by-3 grid of squares, in which each square can be either green or blue. All 512 possible 9-blocks are constructed and assembled in a "bar…

This paper addresses the controversial issues of improving the reading skills of young learners through technology-assisted reading programmes. On reporting the results of primary school learners from grade 2 to grade 7 who participated in a computer-based reading programme for seven months, we try to answer the critical questions of whether…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has increased the importance of assessment in K-12 education. Designed to ensure that all students meet high academic standards, the law currently requires states receiving Title I funds to test all children annually in reading and math in grades 3 through 8 and report student performance disaggregated by…

Over the last four decades, research in environmental education (EE) has offered valuable theoretical insights spanning a number of pedagogical and philosophical arenas. EE literature offers expansive accounts of projects looking at a multiplicity of factors involved in bringing EE to the forefront of educational endeavour. Within all this…

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…

Commitment and attachment to school and perception of school norms were examined in a sample of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders to determine whether bullies, victims, bully victims, and students who reported no or low levels of bullying and victimization differed in their level of bonding to school and their perceptions of standards and…

Gender differences in the pursuit of technology careers are a current issue of concern. We report on two studies that use surveys, drawings and interviews to examine sixth- and eighth-grade students' perceptions of knowledgeable computer users and their self-perception as a computer-type person. In Study 1, participants were asked to generate…

Objectives : To raise middle school student awareness, attitudes, and proactive behaviors about immunization, and to increase immunization rates among middle school students through implementation of a comprehensive integrated immunization promotion curriculum ( Immunization Plus! ) Methods: Evaluation used a quasi-experimental non-equivalent…

The effect of friendship reciprocation and friend aggression on the stability of aggression across a 6-month period following the transition to secondary school was studied in a sample of 298 Grade 6 children from a predominately white, middle-class, Midwestern American community. The stability of aggression was generally high but it varied as a…

The annual "From the Inside" feature is intended to share real-life positive stories about working with youth. In this year's installment, Ms. Martin writes about her experience being a teenage mentor with girls in grades 6 to 8, the lessons she learned, and the impact this experience has had on her life.

How can middle school counselors identify bullies? This study compared two methods of identifying bullies in a sample of 386 middle school students. A peer nomination survey identified many more bullies than did student self-report. Moreover, self-reported and peer nominated bullies differed in their types of bullying behaviors, level of general…