Neil Bates and Robert Bowry have chosen to tackle the issue of curriculum coherence by including local history, both as starting point for new students joining the school in Year 7 and as a golden thread running throughout their Key Stage 3 curriculum. In this article they explain the rationale for their plans, focusing not only on the powerful…

Research shows that exposure to the outdoors is beneficial to children and can improve the learning experience for students. The Kids in the Woods program in Gainesville, Florida provides 6th grade students with opportunities to learn science through a series of outdoor activities during their regular science classes. The article reports on an…

Socially relevant geoscience topics may be difficult for students to learn. For example, connecting hydraulic fracturing to Midwestern US earthquake swarms and using the fossil record to infer past Earth environments may challenge students because of their prior exposures to nonscientific explanations. Sociocognitive theoretical perspectives based…

We conducted a descriptive exploratory study in which we analyzed 313 sixth to eighth grade students' answers to a word problem, accompanied by diagrams, involving generalization in an algebraic functional context. In this research, we jointly addressed two objectives: (a) to determine the strategies deployed by students to generalize and (b) to…

Circulatory system is a challenging subject for middle school students to learn and understand conceptual relationships. To address these challenges, this study developed plugged (computational thinking activities using computer) and unplugged (computational thinking activities without using computer) teaching modules that integrated computational…

Circle and disc are fundamental concepts introduced in middle school, forming the basis for many other mathematical ideas. Students often face challenges in comprehending circles, discs, and their basic elements. This research examines the processes of sixth-grade students in constructing circles, discs, and their essential components within a…

This study aimed to explore if there was a significant difference in student performance in ELA and Math in middle school grades six through eight, pre- and post-COVID-19. This study aimed to identify student performance deficiencies in grades six through eight relating to gender, socioeconomic status, and race. The significance of this study is…

Students struggling with reading in secondary school are between "learning to read" and "reading to learn." Struggling readers require metacognitive and cognitive reading skills to tackle the complexities of reading. Combining the research of worked-examples and think-aloud shaped the instructional intervention in this study.…

This study examined differences in middle school English Language Arts (ELA) proficiency between pre-pandemic (2019) and post-pandemic (2022) assessments to understand the COVID-19 impact on learning, particularly among vulnerable groups. Grounded in adaptive leadership theory, the research focused on free and reduced-price lunch (FRL) and English…

The aim of this study is to compare the effects of unplugged and plugged-in activities on academic achievement and computational thinking (CT) skills of sixth-grade students. Mixed-method research was carried out to explore whether there were differences between the groups, and to learn the students' opinions and experiences regarding the…

This study aimed to investigate the effects of robotic coding supported Design-Based Science Instruction (RC-DBSI) on sixth-grade students' science process skills. One-group pretest-posttest experimental design was employed in the study. Participants consisted of thirty-nine sixth-grade students enrolled in a public middle school located in the…

The relation between cognition and life satisfaction is shaped by several factors. The present research investigated whether mindreading skills are linked to subjective well-being and anxiety during the transition into adolescence. Specifically, our aim was to investigate individual differences in those constructs and gendered relational patterns.…

This study examined the mediating role of student engagement in the relationship between students' perception of the instructional environment and English course achievement. The study sample consisted of 456 volunteer students studying in the 6th grade of secondary school in Türkiye. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the mediation…

With the popularity of robotics education, attention has been drawn to students' perceptions of robots. This study provides a framework to understand students' imagination about and perceptions of robots from four dimensions of robot identity--nature, social, emotional, and evolutionary. We applied the framework on 80 literary products generated…

Coding is increasingly popular in schools around the world and is often taught by non-specialist teachers as an integrated task with other subject areas. In this article, we explore the relationship between computer science (CS) concepts and students' multimodal expression in a coding animated narrative (CAN) task in the context of an integrated…