This document reports on an investigation that described patterns of interests in specific careers for academically talented seventh grade girls and boys. This study represents a step in addressing the unequal distribution of males and females in many occupational fields, most notably the low involvement of females in scientific and technical…

A study examined the hypothesis that learning strategy coupled with efficacy-building teaching interactions would lead to greater strategic learning than learning strategy instruction alone. A reading comprehension strategy was taught to 184 students from 4 Los Angeles County (California) public and independent schools. Included were 65…

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…

This study used an open-ended problem-solving approach to teaching and assessing middle school students' understanding of the concept of arithmetic average. Three main results of this study show evidence of positive instructional impact on students' understanding of the concept of average: (1) the number of students who gave correct answers…

This unit is one of a series that presents specific moments in history from which students focus on the meanings of landmark events. The lessons included in this unit attempt to make slavery comprehensible to students, showing its oppressiveness and yet explaining how white Southern culture rationalized and sustained it. The unit also explains how…

This unit is one of a series that represents specific moments in history from which students focus on the meanings of landmark events. By relying on primary sources, this unit explores the Puritans' attempt to create a utopian community in New England, the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The unit is built around 7 objectives: (1) to study historical…

Outcomes of a teacher-teaming program that was implemented among seventh-grade teachers at a Florida middle school are described in this practicum report. Training sessions on effective teaming practices were initiated to address the lack of effective teaming practices among the seventh-grade teachers. Eight seventh-grade teachers participated in…

A study compared the comprehension abilities of readers when reading narrative and expository discourse. It was designed to investigate how middle-level high-achieving and low-achieving readers comprehend the two discourse genres, testing the readers' comprehension of main ideas in the text under both conditions. Also examined was whether…

This investigation examined middle-school students' attitudes toward and abilities to benefit from small group computer-based instruction (CBI) as a function of their academic aptitudes, gender, and learning situations. Two studies were conducted with different tasks. Seventy-six seventh graders (39 high aptitude and 37 low aptitude) from a…

A pilot program was developed and implemented to improve the music performance of middle school choral students. A target group of 27 low performing students in grade seven and eight participated in the program. The program utilized four strategies for improving performance skills. Lectures were given by inspirational leaders. Small groups were…

This curriculum module, one of seven developed by the "Infusion Project," offers information and miscellaneous lessons on drug use prevention for integration into an existing seventh-grade middle school curriculum. The module, based on a type of interactive learning called infusion learning contains seven lessons each providing…

This paper describes a teaching approach in which a middle school classroom teacher and a team-teacher by satellite present a course in Basic English and Reading for remedial reading students in grades 7-8. The team-teacher at Oklahoma State University is a "talking head" who teaches on television. The television portion of the course, "Reading in…

This study proposed that captioned television, as a multi-sensory, largely entertaining medium might be an important source of comprehensive input for bilingual students in learning language and literacy. To explore this issue, the study investigated the following questions: (1) can bilingual students acquire vocabulary incidentally through…

This study examined a smoking intervention program, which employed group competitions with rewards, to determine its effects on adolescents' smoking-relevant beliefs, their subjective norms, and peer influence. Initially, 1,187 seventh graders in Burlington, Clinton, and Muscatine, Iowa were surveyed in 1984. Data were gathered from a re-survey…

This research examined the impact of the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT) project on seventh grade students in the year following their ACOT participation in sixth grade. Subjects were 24 former ACOT students and 29 matched control students, all of whom had attended sixth grade at the same school. All subjects were minority students…