This case study describes how culturally relevant pedagogy can be used in disciplinary rigorous ways in an urban middle school history classroom. The focus is on a unit about the Johnstown Flood of 1889, which provided a setting for teaching about the event as well as the historical thinking practices of contextualizing, sourcing, and…

This exploratory design experiment investigates Black male youth's participation in a science-learning environment designed to conceptualize the practice of critique as improvisational performance. The research highlights the young men's deployment of a linguistic practice, signifying, used to co-construct and enact the practice of collaborative…

This article reports findings from a quasi-experimental study of the impact of a summer robotics program for urban middle-grade students. The study focuses on student engagement, measured by school attendance rate the year following the program. Program students, who were nearly all low-income minority students, were matched to comparison students…

Determined changes in attitudes toward science from the end of the first semester to the end of the second semester among 299 seventh-grade life science students in a southeastern urban school system. Results reveal that the average attitude toward science changed from undecided to positive. Significant relationships were found among the…