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…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine the 3-year trajectory of students' interest in learning physical activity (PA) knowledge during middle school and the effects of gender and prior knowledge on the trajectory. Methods: Using a repeated-measures design, a cohort of 447 sixth-grade students' interest in learning PA knowledge was…

Effectively evaluating the credibility and accuracy of multiple sources is critical for college readiness. We developed 24 source evaluation tasks spanning four predicted difficulty levels of a hypothesized learning progression (LP) and piloted these tasks to evaluate the utility of an LP-based approach to designing formative literacy assessments.…

Student engagement in mathematics in the early secondary years can be fragile. Engagement in learning fluctuates in response to students' mathematics experiences and is underpinned by numerous adaptive and maladaptive factors. Thirty-seven 11-12 year old students (grades 6-7) responded twice to a questionnaire to measure shifts in their engagement…

The disengagement that leads to school dropout may start as early as middle school, but may be interrupted by motivational interventions. One approach is to promote the relevance of content through explanations and demonstrations of the value of this content to students' futures. CareerStart is an intervention that provides teachers prepackaged…

The study investigated the longitudinal relations between students' roles in bullying (i.e., bullying, defending, and victimization) and social status within the class. Moreover, we tested the hypothesis that students' perception of their own status may mediate these relations. A sample of 432 early adolescents completed peer nominations for…

The Conover Solution is a nonparametric method used to analyze relative growth in students' achievement on state tests administered on two or more occasions. However, there has been very little research assessing the robustness of this method in the presence of missing data. Using vertically scaled and non-vertically scaled data from the math…

The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between secondary school students' perceptions of school climate, their school belonging and their academic achievement. This descriptive study uses the correlational survey model. The participants were 340 sixth and seventh graders at a secondary school in the 2007-2008 academic year. To this…

This paper examines three elementary school mathematics textbooks (one textbook from each of 6th, 7th, and 8th grade) to determine to what extent these textbooks present questions with multiple outcomes and multiple solution methods. Document analysis as a qualitative research method is adopted. The findings reveal that only 8% of all three…

Background: Preventing student academic failure is crucial to student health and life success. Previous studies suggest a positive school climate may reduce students' risk for academic failure and contribute to academic success. The purpose of this study was to determine the longitudinal associations between school climate and academic grades in a…

We used the Stanford education data archive (SEDA) data to examine the heterogeneity among urban school districts in the United States. The SEDA 2.1 includes data sets on students' mathematics (Math) and English language arts (ELA) achievement from 2008 to 2014 at the district level. Growth mixture modeling was used to uncover the underlying…

The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) conducts a student survey in the spring of each year to determine the level of student engagement in and out of the classroom. Students who actively participate in their learning process generally experience higher academic achievement (Wang & Hofkens, 2020). The survey contains items from the…

Research has shown links between emotion regulation strategies and child mental health. However, it is not well known how the characteristics of children may moderate these links. The aim of this study was to explore whether environmental sensitivity--the ability to perceive and process information about the environment--moderates links between…

Art and artistic activities that play a significant role in the lives of both children and adults are an important requirement for all individuals. Cultures develop, expand, and enrich through artistic activities, which are important for the development of visual literacy, especially in social studies. The present study aims to determine the…

Modeling and simulation activities are common in secondary technology and engineering education classrooms. Virtual simulations are used to integrate engineering design into classroom instruction. The performance outcomes of a student's final virtual design usually depend on the level of knowledge application. When applying the learned content to…