Adolescence is a critical time period when it comes to fostering lifelong interest and practices in reading, yet a decreasing number of middle school students are performing at Proficient and Advanced levels in reading. The purpose of this study was to examine whether providing middle school students with an increased level of choice in their…

Because studies examining youth drug use often have data with a high proportion of zeros, they often do not meet the assumptions for univariate or linear regression analyses that are typically used. We demonstrate the use of zero-inflated negative binomial regression models to address excessive zeros in drug use frequency on perceptions of…

Teaching deeper learning involves cultivating the critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration skills that students need to be successful in their college, career, and civic life. It also involves encouraging students to be active participants in their learning. Public schools across the United States often work to help students develop…

Declining academic performance, along with a growing apathy of students toward the value of education, demonstrates that students in the United States public education system do not recognize the value of a positive experience in middle schools. A plethora of research and writing has been done on elementary schools and secondary schools, but…

Animated pedagogical agents (APAs) have the potential to provide one-on-one, just-in-time instruction, guidance or mentoring in classrooms where such individualized human interactions may be infeasible. Much current APA research focuses on a wide range of design variables tested with small samples or in laboratory settings, while overlooking…

The central purposes of this study were to review the development and evolution of the Scientific Attitude Inventory (SAI) and then reevaluate the psychometric properties of the revised form of the SAI, the Scientific Attitude Inventory II (SAI-II). The SAI-II was administered to a convenience sample of 543 middle and high school students from…

"MCPS School Safety and Security at a Glance" provides, in a single document, information about the reporting of incidents related to school safety and security, school climate, local school safety program descriptions, and serious incidents. Information is presented for each Montgomery County (Maryland) public school. While much of this…

The purpose of this study was to examine prospective middle and secondary teachers' preferences for unique versus relevant student responses during classroom discussions. Results indicate that, on average, prospective teachers (N = 70) preferred relevance to uniqueness in student responses. In addition, results of regression analysis indicate that…

A path model based in a theory of social capital was tested with Latino middle school (n = 195, 58% female, average 13.8 years of age) and high school students (n = 129, 64% female, average 16.8 years of age). Most participants (77%) were immigrants (predominantly from Mexico). Questionnaires assessed student perceptions of parent involvement,…

This study investigates middle graders' understanding of significance in United States history through open-ended interviews with 48 students in grades 5-8. Students were presented with a set of captioned historical pictures and asked to choose the one important enough to include on a timeline of the last five hundred years, and to explain their…

This document reports on a civics attitudes questionnaire that was piloted for the purpose of developing psychometrically sound measures of the socio-political attitudes of Japanese middle school students and climate in Japanese middle school classrooms. Studies of Japanese education have produced mixed opinions about the civic dispositions of…

"MCPS School Safety and Security at a Glance" provides, in a single document, information about the reporting of incidents related to school safety and security, school climate, local school safety program descriptions, and serious incidents in all Montgomery County (Maryland) public schools. The information is presented for each school.…

The relationship between teachers' and students' personal constructs regarding intrinsic motivation in the mathematics class were examined in this study. Participants were six middle-school mathematics teachers and 30 students from 5 classes. Videotape, direct observation, individual interviews, and repertory grid tasks focused on the ways in…

A study was done to evaluate Partners for Valued Youth (PVY), an instructional cross-age tutoring program in San Antonio (Texas) designed to reduce dropout rates among Hispanic limited-English proficient (LEP) middle-school children, who are at risk of leaving school. The program has these students tutor younger, elementary school students. The…

This paper reports the effects of thematically integrated mathematics instruction on achievement, attitudes, and motivation in mathematics among middle school students of Mexican descent. A school-university collaborative effort led to the development and testing of a thematic approach undertaken as a means of contextualizing instruction for…