Researchers use data from the RAND American Mathematics Educator Study surveys of public school principals and teachers to investigate three school structures--referred to as "school opportunity structures" throughout this report--that may affect kindergarten through 8th grade (K-8) students' mathematics learning. These structures are…

From decades of recommendations, middle school advocates have recommended various organizational structures and instructional practices to meet the specific educational needs of young adolescents. Several notable national studies have sought to assess and report the status of implementation of these recommended practices, though largely from the…

Purpose: This study aims to identify the main motivational factors that led practicing teachers to choose teaching as a profession in the United States and Turkey. Another purpose of this research is to investigate the possible significant difference between male and female teachers from the United States and Turkey considering motivational…

The education of the young adolescent has consistently posed a challenge to the educational community. While the general belief is this age group (10 to 15 year-old children) would benefit from a specialized educational approach. Historically, both the junior high school model of the early 1900s and the more current middle school concept have…

Despite its importance in promoting student academic achievement and career development, writing pedagogy has received little emphasis in research and professional development efforts. The purpose of this study was to examine teacher perceptions and practices of writing in the middle grades from a cross-cultural perspective. 16 middle-grade…

This mixed methods case study focuses on one school's experiences with Do the Write Thing (DtWT) Challenge, a national violence prevention program for middle schools. Using the theory of planned behavior as a theoretical framework, we examined program impact and learning activities. Students in participating schools demonstrated significantly more…

This paper examines the interplay of creativity, education, and the expressive arts. We begin by presenting a narrative literature review focusing on the use of artistic tools to promote creativity, self-expressiveness, and meaningful aspects of emotional and social learning. This review reveals strong connections between the different components…

An immigrant is broadly defined as a foreign person living in another country while a refugee is one who cannot return to his or her home country due to fear of persecution which is based on race, religion, ethnicity, membership in a particular social group, or political belief. These words can conjure different images for different people. Some…

This comparative study examines the extent to which the 21st-century skills are integrated into the 4th and 8th-grade public school science curriculum in Canada in relation to that of the United States of America (USA) by analyzing the 4th and 8th grade Common Framework of Science Learning Outcomes of Canada and the 4th and 8th grade Next…

This study fills a gap with TPACK instrumentation by validating a survey instrument for use specifically with secondary mathematics in-service teachers in the United States using an instrument originally developed in Australia (Handal et al., 2012). A comparable national sample was surveyed in the U.S. to the original Australian instrumentation…

There is a critical need to understand the factors that influence the development of students' skills for using the Internet to search for and locate information. Teachers play an important role in this process and there is a related impetus to identify the dynamics of instruction in information-seeking activities. This study investigated German…

The goal of this study was to advance the conceptualization and measurement of adolescent popularity by exploring the commonly used composite score (popularity minus unpopularity). We used standardized peer nominations from 4,414 early adolescents (ages [approximately equal to] 12-14 years) from three samples collected in two countries. Popularity…

At the same time teachers and administrators grapple with how to develop teachers' understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the classroom, recent legislative sessions have unleashed a flood of legislation that seeks to limit teachers from teaching about race, racism, oppression, and injustice in U.S. schools. Teachers are struggling…

The present study uses doubly latent models to estimate the effect of average mathematics achievement at the class level on students' subsequent mathematics achievement (the "Peer Spillover Effect") and mathematics self-concept (the "Big-Fish-Little-Pond-Effect; BFLPE"), controlling for individual differences in prior…

The current study compared American, Korean, and Indonesian middle and high school students' CS attitudes. Concurrently, this study also examined whether the items in the CS attitudes scale exhibit country and gender measurement biases. We gathered data on CS attitudes from middle and high school students in the US, Korea, and Indonesia. The…