This report addresses a renewed interest in individualized instruction, driven in part by advances in technology and assessment as well as a persistent desire to increase the access, efficiency, and cost effectiveness of training and education. Using computer-based instruction we delivered extremely efficient instruction targeted to low knowledge…

The current study examined school-level victimization as a moderator of associations between peer victimization and changes in 2 types of self-blaming attributions, characterological and behavioral, across the first year of middle school. These associations were tested in a large sample (N = 5,991) of ethnically diverse adolescents from fall to…

Purpose: Increasing physical activity among adolescents is a public health priority. Because people are motivated to engage in activities that make them feel good, this study examined predictors of adolescents' feelings during exercise. Method: During the 1st semester of the school year, we assessed 6th-grade students' (N = 136) cognitive…

We investigated general vocabulary and academic vocabulary growth trajectories of adolescent language minority students using an individual growth modeling approach. Our analytical sample included 3161 sixth- to eighth-grade students from an urban school district in California. The language minority students in our sample were classified as…

New analytical tools have facilitated the exploration of the trajectories of alcohol use; however, there are a limited number of studies that explore early adolescence. A sample of 5,903 youths followed from sixth through eighth grade was used to (1) examine the trajectories of alcohol use and (2) determine the degree to which common correlates…

Learning physics often requires overcoming common misconceptions based on naïve interpretations of observations in the everyday world. One proposed way to help learners build appropriate physics intuitions is to expose them to computer simulations in which motion is based on Newtonian principles. In addition, playing video games that require…

Relations between paternal autonomy support and four aspects of adolescent social competence and responsibility at age 16 were examined using data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. With controls on maternal autonomy support, significant relations were observed between paternal autonomy support and three of the four…

Understanding what children know is paramount to planning effective science instruction; however, in any classroom, the students hold a variety of ideas. Representing these differences in ways that also acknowledge the common trends among students might facilitate the process of differentiation. To exemplify one such possible process of…

Although researchers call for inquiry learning in science, science assessments rarely capture the impact of inquiry instruction. This paper reports on the development and validation of assessments designed to measure middle-school students' progress in gaining integrated understanding of energy while studying an inquiry-oriented curriculum. The…

This experimental study examined how the reading and writing development of sixth-grade L2 students was affected by syntactic enhancement. Visual-syntactic text formatting (VSTF) technology, which visualizes syntactic structures, was used to convert a textbook to the one with syntactic enhancement. The sample (n = 282), which was drawn from a…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine if classroom configuration--departmentalized and self-contained--is related to the academic achievement of Grade 6 students in a large urban school district as measured by California Standards Test (CST) scores in mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA) when controlling for prior academic…

To add to the evidence base on effective strategies for teaching English language learner students, the 2006-2011 REL West at WestEd conducted a rigorous study, using an intent-to-treat model, of the impact on middle grades student achievement of offering teachers the opportunity to participate in a teacher professional development program. The…

Exergames (active video games that require kinesthetic movement) played in proximity to other players or against a gaming machine have been linked to positive increases in cognitive functioning. This study tested to see if remote exergame play over the Internet had an impact similar to exergames that are played in proximity. The study shows that…

This study examined how participation of Latino students in two-way dual immersion versus mainstream programs might have impacted students' relationships with Spanish-speaking adults, thus affecting contexts for students to develop resiliency. Participants were parents of 90 fifth- and sixth-grade students (initially English proficient [EP] as…

This quantitative study explored the academic progress of at-risk students in English language arts (ELA) when they were given differentiated instruction (DI) and universally designed curriculum (UDC) to address their academic needs. The purpose of the study was to determine if there was a significant change in passing rates on the California…