A study examined rural students' academic aspirations and expectations, their perceptions of their parents' aspirations and expectations, and their parents' actual aspirations and expectations. Surveys were completed by 3,733 seventh grade-students in 54 schools in 17 West Virginia counties. Parent response rates were lower, with approximately two…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of implementation of student-centered activities based on multiple intelligences (MI) theory on grade-7 students' attitudes toward and perceptions of science. While the experimental group consisting of 25 students was taught a unit on the atom and atomic properties using strategies based on…

This study examined the relationship between students' self-reported goals of being socially responsible and of forming relationships with peers, to their achievement goals in English and mathematics. The sample consisted of 175 male and 138 female seventh-graders from a predominantly white, lower middle-class middle school. The study found that…

This paper reports on the interaction patterns of 12 6th-grade students who participated in a teacher research study on mathematical discourse, presenting data on teacher-student and student-student interaction patterns. It highlights how one white, female student's participation and attitudes changed from passive to less passive between 6th and…

This case study of electronic correspondence and interactions shares some things that seemed to work and some that didn't when a seventh grade remedial reading class chatted online with a university-based professor of curriculum and instruction. The middle school students and teacher became quite interested in this activity. These students were…

Historical thinking involves being able to conceptualize historical events from multiple perspectives and to relate historical data within these. Hypermedia has enormous potential for supporting the development of historical thinking because it is open, nonlinear, and heterogeneous in ways other media is not; it can physically represent…

Social cognitive theory suggests that individuals' beliefs about their efficacy in specific contexts, such as school, influence their motivation in those settings. The relationship between various sociocultural factors and the development of adolescents' perceived academic self-efficacy are investigated in this paper. Participants (N=202), drawn…

The classroom environment that teachers provide for special needs students directly influences students' self-concept. To explore the scope of this relationship, students in homogeneous and heterogeneous classes, along with other environmental factors, were studied. Data was taken from special needs students in middle school, who either had been…

This study used three different differential item functioning (DIF) procedures to examine the extent to which items in a mathematics performance assessment functioned differently for matched gender groups. In addition to examining the appropriateness of individual items in terms of DIF with respect to gender, an attempt was made to identify…

This study examined the effects of social competence, group formation, and group behavior on the marginalization of students in a 7th-grade physical education setting. Marginalized students are defined as those in the class, but not "of" the class. In addition, factors such as individual and team activity and teacher expectations help to…

This paper presents Rowland's Ways of Knowing and Decision-making Model for curriculum development and how it can be applied to environmental education curricula. The model uses a problem solving approach based on steps of: (1) coming to know the problem through the ways of knowing of the disciplines and personal knowledge; (2) proposing solutions…

This paper reports on the evaluation of an 11-week curriculum created to foster seventh grade students' understanding of scientific modeling. In the curriculum, students engaged in model-oriented activities such as creating non-Newtonian computer microworlds to embody their conceptual models, evaluating their models with criteria, and reflecting…

Generative learning strategies are the focus of the study described in this paper. Research questions pertain to the effect of practice in the generation of analogies and summaries by Grade 7 students on their achievement in science, the different types and numbers of analogies that students generate, and students' perceptions of the effectiveness…

This study examined the generalizability of the internal/external (I/E) frame of reference model of academic self-concept development. The "external" component of the model refers to comparing one's achievement with one's peers; in LISREL causal modeling, this external comparison is presented as positive paths. The "internal"…

The program evaluated in this paper has a three-pronged design which includes two holistic strategies, Integrated Skill Development (ISD) and Thinking Across the Curriculum (TAC), in addition to the Supplemental Curriculum (SC). A pretest-posttest control group design with matching was employed. The program was conducted at the Cleveland School…