Collaborating with three university researchers, three seventh-grade teachers and their students worked on one component of a three-year NSF-funded research project examining the media messages about information technology and careers that middle school students receive from television, popular magazines, books, videotapes, movies, and Web sites.…

Researchers from BBN Laboratories and Lesley College (Massachusetts) have begun exploratory studies to build an understanding of the learning that occurs when middle school students interact with science-based simulations. Sixty hours of discussion among eight middle school students were videotaped as they used the simulations from the…

This paper contains a variety of instructional strategies and a review of research related to different learning styles. A learning styles inventory, style profiles, and information regarding some types of activities for students with different learning styles are included. Two sample lesson plans introduce and describe the inductive learning…

This report is an examination of recommended and actual school-based guidance policies, programs, and practices for young adolescents. The information is drawn from Canadian and international publications, and from a survey of guidance and career education programs for grades 7-8 in Ontario boards of education and schools, called The 1990 Ontario…

The present study investigated the relationship among middle school students' self-perceived locus of control, their school achievement, and their school attendance. A cohort of 265 seventh-grade students was administered the children's version of the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control (MHLC-C) scales, which measure health locus of control…

This document articulates the goals and objectives of the middle school guidance program in Orange County, Florida Public Schools system. Professional roles and responsibilities are discussed, as well as program implementation. These goals to assist students are listed for the middle school guidance program: (1) understanding the school…

GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs) is a federally funded program aimed at encouraging disadvantaged middle and high school students to have high expectations, stay in school, and take college preparatory courses. The West Virginia Department of Education received funding to conduct the program in eight rural…

Two papers by the same author describe efforts to predict school dropouts by collecting information from students and teachers during grade seven. In the first paper, "Trying To Predict School Dropouts at Grade Seven," researchers developed an instrument, "Is This True for Me?" based on the Junior Index of Motivation (JIM)…

In this article, the author shares her experience of participating in "The Novel Process" workshop, given by Roz Morris in Hoover, Alabama, for her seventh grade advanced reading class at Robert F. Bumpus Middle School. "The Novel Process" is a year-long writing project that culminates in the publication of a novel that…

Cigarette smoking has been identified as the most important source of preventable morbidity and premature mortality worldwide (American Lung Association, 2002). Statistics show that youth who do smoke report having their first cigarette while in middle school, thus this is a critical opportunity for prevention (Eissenburg & Balster, 2000). This…

Vertical connections, constructed using inquiry, give students the skills to reach new heights in both their academic and local communities. In this article, the authors present inquiry projects, developed by middle level teachers, to ensure that students use higher-level thinking skills to improve the community. Each project is connected to the…

The purpose of the Peer Victimization Intervention (PVI) was to develop and implement a culture-specific pilot intervention to address the effects of bullying on middle school students who are victims utilizing the Participatory Culture-Specific Intervention Model (PCSIM; Nastasi, Moore, & Varjas, 2004). The involvement of participants who serve…

The purpose of this study was to develop a program to help cultivate divergent thinking in mathematics based on open-ended problems and to investigate its effect. The participants were 398 seventh grade students attending middle schools in Seoul. A method of pre- and post-testing was used to measure mainly divergent thinking skills through…

A study used qualitative methods, as part of a 2-year collaborative university/middle school effort, to understand the instructional reading practices in effect at the seventh-grade level and to investigate whether any of the practices might be related to differential reading performance of the school's African-American students. Few of the…

The Probability Inquiry Environment (PIE) is being designed as a computer-mediated collaborative inquiry environment to aid middle school students in learning elementary probability. This paper reports on a study in which seventh grade students engaged in probabilistic reasoning while interacting with a preliminary version of PIE. By analyzing the…