Homophobic name-calling is commonplace in middle schools and is emerging as an antecedent to more serious, deleterious concerns, including depressive or anxious symptoms among youth. While music education researchers suggest that youth enrolled in music ensembles are targets for homophobic epitaphs, little is known about how experiencing…

Little is known about the impact of science fair participation on student science inquiry learning. Furthermore, there is only a small research base relating to science fair participation and student attitudes toward science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers and coursework. In this study, 41 seventh-grade science fair…

The aim of the present study is to enable future studies into students' attitudes toward science, and related constructs, by developing and validating an instrument suitable for cross-sectional designs. Following a thorough review of the literature it was determined that many extant instruments included design aspects that appeared to be limited…

The purpose of this study is to assess whether bullying behaviors were impacted by the character education curriculum "Character Counts!" in fourth and seventh grade students. More specifically, over time are the perceptions that the students had of bullying behaviors impacted and is there a difference between the perceptions that boys…

Background: Asthma places a heavy burden on Chicago's schoolchildren, particularly in low-income, minority communities. Recently, our group developed a 10-week afterschool program, the Student Asthma Research Team (START), which successfully engaged high school youth in a Photovoice investigation of factors impacting their asthma at school and in…

Involving more than 1,500 academically gifted students and their parents, this study examined relationships between family environment and social competence of gifted students. Results from an online survey revealed that our gifted students rated their families as cohesive and flexible with high levels of satisfaction and communication among…

This research examined whether the benefits of parents' involvement in children's learning are due in part to value development among children. Four times over the 7th and 8th grades, 825 American and Chinese children (M age = 12.73 years) reported on their parents' involvement in their learning and their perceptions of the value their parents…

We examine whether teachers' communicator style relates to student engagement, teacher-student relationships, student perceptions of teacher immediacy, as well as observer ratings of delivery skills during the implementation of All Stars, a middle school-based substance use prevention program. Data from 48 teachers who taught All Stars up to 3…

Over the past few decades, service-learning has surged in popularity. Although most programs are implemented in high school and college classrooms, service-learning has the potential for great impact in middle school. The present article evaluates a pilot service-learning program for fifth- and seventh-grade (N = 86) children in a large, urban,…

Community schools are an approach that has been adopted to respond to this educational crisis. By partnering with local agencies, community schools provide students and families with access to healthcare services, educational enhancement and recreational opportunities, family economic supports such as workforce development and income tax…

This study is a transcendental phenomenological study that described the experience of students' interest in science from elementary school through middle school grades and the identification of the factors that increase or decrease interest in science. Numerous researchers have found that interest in science changes among children and the change…

Network position ("isolate," "member," "liaison"), peer-group substance use, and their interaction were examined as predictors of cigarette, alcohol, and marijuana use in a sample of 163 urban sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. Two measures of peer substance use were compared: one based on social network analysis…

This report described how implementation of differentiated assignments provided documentation of how students' motivation increased. The volunteers that participated in this study were 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. Students struggle academically to meet the expectations of their instructors. These struggles impact how students learn academically,…

A project developed a program for improving deficient student-to-student listening skills. The targeted population consisted of 18 seventh-grade middle school students in a culturally diverse, lower middle class community in a near-western suburb of Chicago. The problem of deficient listening skills was evident through teacher observation and…

THE FREQUENCY AND INFLUENCES OF VOCATIONAL TYPE PREFERENCES AMONG APPROXIMATELY 350 SEVENTH AND EIGHTH GRADERS WERE DETERMINED DURING THIS STUDY. PROJECT ACTIVITIES WERE CONDUCTED AS SUPPLEMENTARY TO COOPERATIVE RESEARCH PROJECT NO. 367, "A STUDY OF INTERESTS OF CHILDREN AND YOUTH," AND WERE REPORTED IN A DOCTORAL DISSERTATION. DATA WERE…