This study examined adolescent developmental experiences and participation in extracurricular activities. Providing youth with multiple channels to nurture their development and acknowledge their interests and strengths can play a significant role in their holistic growth. This is a descriptive study of a mixed-methods design (quantitative and…

The purpose of this study was three-fold: to measure the ability of the "Medical Explorers" case-based curriculum to improve higher order thinking skills; to evaluate the impact of the "Medical Explorers" case-based curriculum to help students be self directed learners; and to investigate the impact of the "Medical…

Our nation's K-12 schools are faced with numerous critical challenges that affect student achievement and consequently impact society. Key challenges, such as elevating academic achievement, meeting state and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) standards, high dropout rates, at-risk students, parental involvement, and the recruitment and retention of…

This study followed a cohort of students from Grade 1 to Grade 11 in one struggling school district that had Reading Recovery (RR) in the Grade 1. The RR program is an intervention given only to students in the Grade 1 who are reading below grade level on the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Assessment. The researched district had a high poverty, high…

Good behavior is a necessary condition for effective teaching. There are few children who come to school without problems. Children's behavior at school appears to be strongly affected by within school factors. In this qualitative case study, the teachers' negative behavior with regard to the high school last year students in the classroom…

To investigate how adolescents interpret ambiguous actions in hypothetical interracial peer encounters, we conducted a study in which 8th- and 11th-grade students (N = 837) evaluated 4 interracial peer encounters in which the intentions of the protagonist were ambiguous. The sample was evenly divided by gender and included both African American…

This activity discusses a unit exercise in which a physics practical was implemented during a laboratory session. The lab practical design was centered on Newton's Second Law. The practical was implemented in a high school setting. Further, through the administration of both a pre and post test we were able to assess the effectiveness of the lab…

This study has been carried out to develop a tool to measure the level of anxiety of students studying in the 10th and 11th grades of high schools in Turkey. The scale has been created by the application of a pool of items consisting of 45 sentences based on student opinions and expert advice to 365 students and the branching of the results with…

Because of the recent resurgence of interest in citizenship education caused by world conflicts, the authors studied the perceptions of eighth- and eleventh-grade students regarding citizenship. Their findings yield insight into what students believe to be the attributes of a good citizen; which participatory activities relate to being good…

This study investigated if a relationship existed between student achievement in 10th grade Missouri Assessment Program mathematics and 11th grade communication arts scores in 2007 and high school leadership team perceptions of the extent to which they demonstrated leadership practices. The secondary purpose was to compare perceptional…

This paper reports on the effects the use of a pocket calculator-based computer algebra system (CAS) has on the performance in mathematics of grade 11 students in Germany. A project started at 8 of about one hundred upper secondary schools in the federal state of Thuringia in 1999; 3 years later the former restrictions on the use of technology in…

This study attempted to observe if there was a statistical significant relationship between perceptions of educational change and student achievement. The independent variables that represented perceptions of educational change included: community pressure for change, faculty anxiety to change, faculty openness to change, principal anxiety to…

The annual event dropout rate describes the proportion of students who leave school each year without completing a high school program. The event dropout rates for the school year 2008-2009 of 2.04% for grades 7 through 12th and 2.89% for grades 9 through 12th are consistent with the dropout rates for the past four years. The event completion rate…

The authors examine whether standards based accountability reforms of the past two decades have closed the achievement gap among public and private high school students. They analyzed data from the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) to examine sector differences in high school achievement in the era of standards based reforms. The authors found…

The ideal of creating a non-racial and equitable school environment is embedded in the South African Constitution. This ideal is informed by a desire to overcome the divisions of the apartheid past by pursuing policies and strategies that will promote the achievement of social cohesion, without denying space for various identities. Schools are…