This piece summarizes one teacher's experiences during the abrupt move to digital learning due to COVID 19. This is not a full research study.

Using data from a large southwestern school district, Bui, Craig, and Imberman investigated the effects of gifted and talented programming on middle school students' achievement and behavior (attendance and discipline) through two avenues. Using a regression discontinuity design for the first set of analyses, the authors took advantage of a…

This article argues that the integration of local history and geography through collaborative digital mapping can lead to greater interest in civic participation by early adolescent learners. In the study, twenty-nine middle school students were asked to research, represent, and discuss local urban sites of historical significance on an…

Drawing on data collected during the second year of a longitudinal qualitative study that followed over 10 Latino/a bilingual students, this article foregrounds the experiences of participants during their sixth-grade year. The principle data sources included structured and unstructured interviews with teachers and students, school observations,…

In this article, the author discusses a five-month interdisciplinary bird study that she designed for her seventh-grade students that combines life science, technology, writing, art, mathematics, social studies and literature. The driving force behind this yearly unit is the BirdSleuth eBird program (formerly the Cornell University Classroom…

Stroop interference is often taken as evidence for reading automaticity even though young and poor readers, who presumably lack reading automaticity, present strong interference. Here the relationship between reading skills and Stroop interference was studied in a 7th-grade sample. Greater interference was observed in children diagnosed with…

The definition of literacy has become narrow, bounded, and associated predominantly with measurement of cognitive skills used to decode words. In this article, the author explores the absence in the literacy instruction of a clear, deliberate, and intentional focus upon "connectedness" between the reader and the text. The author maintains that…

In this article, the authors talk about transformation geometry being treated as little more than a set of tricks rather than as a mathematically rigorous topic. This appears to lead to pupils seeing little point in studying "reflections, rotations and translations" as other than examinable items in some future test. Following the argument…

Many middle school students claim that their voices are ignored in the classroom, where the attitude is too often that the teacher holds the one right answer. Instead of this approach, teachers may wish to use the Socratic Seminar, which prompts students to examine issues and ideas through dialogue and actively involves and motivates them, giving…

The KWL reading comprehension method represents what students know about a topic, what they want to know about it, and what they have learned about the topic. It is designed to enhance reading comprehension in content areas such as physical education, health, music, and technology education. (JOW)

Involving teachers in classroom research can result in improved instruction, more reflective learners, professional growth, and collegial sharing. A seventh-grade teacher-researcher, weighing various strategies for mainstreaming learning-disabled students into her science classes, also ponders the implications of more reflective political practice…

Tells a story about relationships and the long-term effects of literacy instruction through a slice of the authors' personal and pedagogical history. Presents a narration by Esther who weaves her own story with Kenneth's adult voice and excerpts from his seventh-grade autobiography written in 1984, when Esther was his teacher. (SG)

Describes how one English teacher developed a five-day approach by which William Shakespeare's "Macbeth" was successfully introduced to a seventh-grade class. Argues that it is possible to have such young students read and enjoy Shakespeare. (HB)

Offers a humorous account of a writing assignment in which seventh-grade students, in response to a detailed description of a living room, wrote descriptions of who lived there, much to the chagrin of their teacher, whose living room it was. (SR)

Discusses the apparent chaos of two student activities in a seventh-grade reading and writing workshop in the light of physicists' recent theories of time. Show how time is thought to be organic and evolving, with the past active in the present, and with students using time not in a linear way but as a whole. (SR)