Adolescents with disabilities have great difficulty with academic content in middle school, and their teachers have difficulty teaching them to understand and use academic language. We taught teachers of 6th grade students with Learning Disabilities, over half of whom were also English Language Learners (ELL), to implement about 15 minutes of…

Adolescents with disabilities have great difficulty with academic content in middle school, and their teachers have difficulty teaching them to understand and use academic language. We taught teachers of sixth-grade students with learning disabilities, more than half of whom were also English language learners (ELLs), to implement about 15 min of…

In this report, the authors present the results of a long-term tracking study that follows 1,177 students who applied to enter 1 of 13 oversubscribed Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) middle schools through a 5th or 6th grade admissions lottery in 2008 or 2009. Those students are now old enough to have attended college for at least two years. This…

The article examines the Going Out program for the 9-12 class at Montessori Greenhouse, in Garden Grove, CA. In this program, the sixth-year students plan outings into the community based on their interests and current studies. Teachers encourage students to be as independent as possible in both the planning and execution of their excursions; this…

The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) self-report form is a brief 25-item measure that assesses the psychological adjustment of youth. Although widely utilized as a screening tool, a lack of consistent psychometric evidence undermines the SDQ's utility as a sound diagnostic tool for all youth. This study focused on examining the…

The COVID-19 pandemic began in the late months of 2019, and by the spring of 2020, to limit transmission of the virus, schools across the globe closed and transitioned to emergency online teaching. While the move to online teaching and learning was inevitable, many learners, especially in rural and remote areas, found that online schooling had…

We present results of a randomized controlled study that compared different types of affective messages delivered by pedagogical agents. We used animated characters that were empathic and emphasized the malleability of intelligence and the importance of effort. Results showed significant correlations between students who received more…

Across countries, the age and timing of when children navigate school transition varies, as does provision of support during this challenging time. These two factors can heavily shape young people's adjustment, yet to date there is minimal research which has investigated how this period is navigated in different cultures. The aim of the present…

Using a national sample of students' writing from the National Study of Writing Instruction, this study examines the current state of writing in the mathematics classroom and the extent to which enactments align with the intentions established in the research base and curricula articulated by NCTM and the CCSS-M. Over 3,000 writing assignments…

Gender in physical education (PE) traditionally enacts discourses of hegemonic masculinities where girls are frequently positioned as the 'problem' regarding their disengagement. The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the experiences of mostly ethnic minority and low-socioeconomic status elementary school girls enrolled in an urban…

Academic achievement disparities based on parental education are robust during the middle school years. The current study examined whether cross-class friendship (i.e., reciprocal relationships between peers with different levels of parental education) decrease class-based achievement differences during a developmental phase when friends are…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA, 2015), which replaced the federal government's education policy called the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, 2002), takes full effect in the 2017-2018 school year with renewed focus on accountability systems established by each state. States must have for their middle schools rigorous accountability systems in…

The current study was designed to examine one possible weight stigma-reduction mechanism: school-level weight diversity. It was hypothesized that greater weight diversity among same-sex peers at school would attenuate the negative association between weight and academic achievement. Across 26 urban public middle schools, 5,991 sixth-grade students…

In this multi-year study, we taught English/Language Arts teachers of students with learning disabilities in middle school to incorporate 15 min of daily vocabulary activities with students in their intact special education English/Language Arts classes. During Year 1, teachers taught 48 words to their sixth grade students, who learned and…

Orthographic processing -- the ability to perceive, access, differentiate, and manipulate orthographic knowledge -- is essential when learning to recognize words. Despite its critical importance in literacy acquisition, the field lacks a tool to assess this essential cognitive ability. The goal of this study was to design a computer-based…