The state of Michigan is increasing its commitment to deeper learning strategies to transform classroom instruction and learning through a competency-based approach to education. Competency-based education (CBE) is a school-based shift in teaching and learning designed to give students individualized support and opportunities to advance based on…

This theoretical article proposes using statewide weather-observing networks (Mesonets) to support data-intensive, issue-based teaching of atmospheric topics in middle and high school science. It is argued that the incorporation of this new technology and its affordances into the school curriculum can drastically change the ways that atmospheric…

This systematic review investigates the effect of teacher professional development (TPD) on adolescent students' reading achievement in middle and high school. A systematic search of TPD and student reading achievement studies (1975-2020) identified 15 medium-quality articles meeting this study's inclusion criteria. A meta-analysis of 14 of these…

This study examined the relationship between regulatory focus and creativity in combination with adaptive-innovative cognitive style and school climate. A total of 687 middle school and high school students (M[subscript age] = 13.98 years; 52.8% males) completed a creative task and questionnaires concerning regulatory focus, adaptive-innovative…

Bias-based bullying (BBB) is a serious problem for school-aged adolescents. However, limited attention has been paid to the mechanism of how BBB may affect youths' sense of belonging to the school. The purpose of the current study was to understand the associations between BBB victimization, school belonging, and school fairness among school-aged…

The primary purpose of this project was to explore how individual (i.e., gender of the intervener) and contextual (i.e., type of bullying and whether the target is a friend) factors influence the use and type of prosocial bystander intervention. This necessitated the development and validation of a survey that deconstructs prosocial bystander…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the role skepticism plays among adolescents' online information literacy skills. Design/methodology/approach: The authors provide the conceptual grounding to operationalize and measure the notion of skepticism in an online information literacy context. Inspired by an existing measure known as the…

A significant body of scholarship in Physics Education Research (PER) has documented that students have intuitive knowledge resources that they use to make sense of the physical world. Similarly, for physicists, symmetry is fundamental to making sense of the universe. In this dissertation, I explore students' intuitive resources related to…

The Action Mapping Project (AMP) is a youth-oriented participatory action project that conducts research and education programs in high schools and middle schools in Tacoma, Washington. AMP uses participatory community mapping to generate new forms of data and conducts educational programs with high school students that center on the use of GIS…

The experiences of girls of color labeled with significant cognitive disabilities in middle school and high school have historically been excluded from educational research. This study sought to better understand how girls of color labeled with significant cognitive disabilities navigated multimodal discourses and classroom practices as well as…

Independent reading is more than just "drop everything and read" -- it is a gateway to writing, critical thinking, discussion, and deeper learning. Author Jarred Amato, an accomplished middle and high school English teacher and founder of Project LIT Community, believes in the power of independent reading not only to turn around the…

Parent-led, home-based education, or homeschooling, has grown rapidly over recent decades with participation rates increasing more than 100-fold to now nearly one in 25 students nationwide in the United States. However, the research base has not grown correspondingly, and homeschoolers remain understudied. We systematically surveyed a population…

Previous research suggests that environment can play an important role in encouraging or discouraging creative expression and productivity. Additional research has uncovered a discrepancy between the creativity students express at school and the creativity they express outside of school. The fact that, in previous research, students expressed more…

Youth vaping is a concern and schools may use many approaches to discipline students caught vaping at school. This study identified the prevalence of school staff seeing vaping in schools and the measures used to discipline students. A state-wide sample of 7,938 staff from 255 middle and high schools reported whether they saw any students vaping…

Both personalization and utility value (UV) interventions have emerged in educational psychology as ways to increase students' interest in learning an academic subject, and potentially improve learning outcomes. However, empirical results for each approach have been mixed and these approaches have worked differently for different groups of…