The purpose of this quantitative ex post facto study was to determine if, and to what extent, differences existed in pre-and-post math scores following the VMath intervention for Title I 6th, 7th, and 8th graders in the Southwestern United States. Three research questions guided this study: (1) is there a statistically significant difference in…

The purpose of the study was to examine the extent to which participants built meaningful culturally and linguistically responsive (CLR) relationships with students and to what extent those same participants engaged in cognitively demanding academic discourse with their students. The participatory action research (PAR) study took place in a rural…

The purpose of this convergent parallel design, mixed methods case study, was to discover the perception of students and teachers of the effectiveness of using school-wide restorative practices for students at the middle school level, grades six through eight, at one middle school site. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs was the Theoretical Framework…

This study analyzes the impact attendance rates of middle school teachers have on academic achievement of students in South Carolina. The factors included are teacher attendance and student performance. The research will give an in-depth look into the affect's teacher absenteeism has on middle school students. And determined whether increased…

This quantitative, correlational study aimed to investigate the relationships between collective teacher efficacy (CTE), its enabling conditions (EC-CTE), and student achievement in third through eighth grades in Colorado. Leveraging the theoretical foundations established by Rotter (1954), Bandura (1977) and expanded by Tschannen-Moran et al.…

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) has implemented a student accountability system that measures students' performance on State of Texas Assessment for Academic Readiness (STAAR) in several content areas. How students perform determines the accountability ratings that will be assigned to every school district in Texas. Therefore, teachers and…

Syntactic knowledge, the implicit and explicit knowledge of syntax, is a necessary--but often overlooked--component of proficient reading (e.g., Deacon & Kieffer, 2018). Though some research exists on effective syntactic instruction, such as sentence combining (Neville & Searls, 1985; Wilkinson & Patty, 1993), researchers have called…

This qualitative case study served to investigate teachers' and students' experiences implementing BASE Education, an electronic learning (e-learning) platform for social and emotional learning (SEL), in an urban charter middle school in Paterson, New Jersey. Convenient purposeful sampling was used to recruit seven students and three…

The purpose of the quantitative correlational study was to examine how educators utilize instructional strategies that align with how the brain learns in private middle schools for students with diagnosed learning differences (neurodiverse schools) and schools for students without diagnosed learning differences (neurotypical schools). The study…

As procedural flexibility, previously understood as adaptive reasoning, emerges as an important consideration in math skill development, it is important to account for executive functioning in that process as well, as executive functioning a well-researched factor in math performance. The current study, a secondary data analysis, explores how…

Access to general education is a federal mandate for all students but a major challenge in middle schools. The problem addressed in this study is a lack of access to the general education curriculum in the middle grades 6th-8th. To solve this problem, the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework was created to provide instructional design…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore the perceived ease of use and usefulness of an assistive robot educator tool. The theoretical foundation for this study was the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Service Robot Acceptance Model (sRAM), which explore perceptions around the utility of technological systems. The…

The purpose of this study was to describe the perceptions middle school students had about agriculture and gardening as part of the GrOW (Gardening and Overall Wellness) Program. This included multiple constructs, including students' gardening efficacy, perceptions of those who had already completed the GrOW Program, perceptions of those who had…

Middle school offers an entryway onto the path of college readiness. However, many practitioners and researchers have focused their efforts on high school students. Remaining is a population of potential college-going students, whose opportunities to prepare for college at an earlier stage are overlooked because middle school is not viewed as the…

Proficient reading requires the ability to analyze words for various properties, including pronunciation, meaning, and syntactical function. However, most instruction in word analysis is limited to phonics instruction provided in the early elementary grades. For older students, whose words largely center units of meaning, or morphemes, early…