Middle school serves as a key milestone for pre-algebra mastery, enabling students to be successful in high school algebra. Yet, at the point when students should be transitioning from learning arithmetic to learning mathematics, many are unprepared in fundamental mathematics concepts that strongly predict algebra achievement. Because mastering…

This paper attempted to make explicit some of the underlying characteristics of spatial visualisation using the concept of area of composite shapes. By engaging students with metric-free tasks, we identify the type of perceptual and visual/spatial manoeuvres that they deploy in such situations. Interview data collected from three students in Grade…

Queensland rural and remote schools have difficulty in attracting experienced, in-field mathematics teachers. Thus, when such teachers arrive, much is expected of them to increase the mathematics knowledge of students. This paper looks at one such teacher who, against the high expectations placed upon him as an in-field teacher, experienced…

Effective leadership appears to be an element of a successful school, but few studies have covered either leadership in small and rural schools or effective schools with the ethnic mix of Anglo, Hispanic, and Native American students. This study's population consisted of the 24 New Mexico rural public elementary schools having an enrollment of 500…

The relationship between educational expenditures and pupil achievement has been a topic of increasing interest to legislators, school boards, and more recently, the courts. This paper examines the relationships among various measures of school district wealth and spending, other school district characteristics, and student achievement within the…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) was designed to measure knowledge, skills, and attitudes of young Americans at various ages in 10 learning areas, and to measure educational attainment over time. Community categories used in NAEP research were High and Low Metro, Urban Fringe, Main Big City, Medium City, Small Places…

The No Child Left Behind Act requires standards-based accountability for school districts and schools receiving Title I funds. A major component of this policy is to report whether districts and schools are making "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) based on their performance goals. This paper raises questions for rural schools using the…

This paper describes a teaching approach in which a middle school classroom teacher and a team-teacher by satellite present a course in Basic English and Reading for remedial reading students in grades 7-8. The team-teacher at Oklahoma State University is a "talking head" who teaches on television. The television portion of the course, "Reading in…

Research suggests that public schools and their authoritarian organizational structure contribute to adolescent alienation, which in turn fosters gang membership. This paper examines alienation and gang membership among eighth-graders in a rural middle school in south central Texas. All 147 students in grade 8 completed a modified version of the…

Performance of rural 13-year-olds on the 1971-1972 social studies assessment by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were reviewed in terms of three major exercise themes. Performance on skill exercises revealed rural strengths in source selection and human affairs insights, but weaknesses in reading maps and graphs. Fewer than…

Sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students (N=301) from a rural county in Tennessee (Iris County is a pseudonym) completed a Rural School Success Inventory (RSSI) and the Learning Styles Inventory (LSI). The study explored differences between low Socioeconomic Status (SES) students and middle/high SES students. The RSSI provided information about…

Belize's Relevant Education for Agriculture and Production (REAP) national primary school program is described in data from seven annual formative evaluations (1979-1985). The 1984-85 program/school evaluation included 54 rural REAP schools and utilized a 43-item questionnaire containing eight quality sub-variables. The quality of REAP schools…

The focus of this paper is to further understanding of the distribution and the effects of an expanded conception of opportunity to learn on student mathematics achievement. In addition to descriptive statistics, a set of two-level hierarchical linear models was employed to analyze a subset of the restricted-use National Education Longitudinal…

In order to investigate the relationship between 7 school system characteristics and student achievement test scores in the 45 metropolitan and 82 nonmetropolitan Alabama school systems, 1979 California Achievement Test combined battery scores for 8th and 12th grade students attending each system in the state were analyzed. For both metropolitan…