As the population of emergent bilingual students in the United States continues to grow, it has become increasingly important to ensure that content area instruction is linguistically and culturally inclusive and accessible. Longitudinal survey and state mathematics assessment data were used to examine how the use of students' home language in the…

When developing school improvement plans and implementing transformational change, why not ask students? Involving students and listening to their voice can provide a better understanding of what is needed and how the school improvement process can be enhanced to promote growth. Principals play a significant role in the leadership of school…

Monitoring one's learning activities is integral to self-regulated learning (SRL) and contributes significantly to successful learning outcomes. Judgments of learning (JOL), a crucial component of SRL, involve metacognitive assessments where individuals gauge their ability to recall learned material on future tests. While prior research…

This dissertation aims to understand the female Saudi mathematics teachers' formative assessment practices after coming back to in-person instruction and the impact of such practices on female student attitudes toward learning mathematics. The study was conducted in two middle schools located in the North and South districts of a large city in…

Student self-beliefs can shape their self-efficacy and influence achievement. Further, student self-beliefs can be influenced by teachers' own beliefs and expectations for their students. Yet, the relations between teacher expectations, teacher and student gender, student mathematics achievement outcomes and self-efficacy have been little…

Background/Context: Political divisiveness, racial reckoning, climate change, and mental health challenges represent just a few contemporary issues facing today's youth. Addressing these challenges now and in the future requires deep interpersonal understanding and collective action--neither of which can be achieved without empathy or prosocial…

Recent literature justifies the use of virtual learning in supporting middle-grades students' mathematical knowledge development and emphasizes the critical role of motivation in learning (Lo & Hew, 2020; Murphy et al., 2020; Spitzer & Musslick, 2021). Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation both play a role in learning for middle-grades…

Digital math assessments with bilingual accommodations allow multilingual learners to use their entire linguistic repertoire to showcase their knowledge and skills. The bilingual accommodations, which include tools like language translation and audio prompts in both English and Spanish, are designed to be adaptable, giving multilingual learners…

The purpose of this convergent parallel design, mixed methods case study, was to discover the perception of students and teachers of the effectiveness of using school-wide restorative practices for students at the middle school level, grades six through eight, at one middle school site. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs was the Theoretical Framework…

Writings related to the meaning and value of music establish that experiences with music influence values and beliefs. The potential impact of this influence highlights the need for sensitivity as teachers orchestrate experiences with musical resources. In a time of increasing division in society, teachers responsibly exercise their influence over…

Positioning students as competent is a teaching practice that uses specific, explicit affirmations to note that students have contributed something meaningful to the community of learners. It supports student agency in the mathematics classroom and contributes to the development of a positive mathematics identity. In this article, the authors…

In this article, we describe a researcher-practitioner partnership (RPP) that used a networked improvement community (NIC) approach to translate social-psychological interventions into educational practices to enhance student motivation and learning. Specifically, we highlight one of our first collaborative projects to develop and scale up an…

Teacher empathy has often been considered vital to successful and equitable teaching practices; however, empirical results have been inconsistent as to the effect of teacher empathy on educational outcomes. Further, researchers have questioned the effectiveness of both recent operationalization's of teacher empathy as well as its application in…

As the pace of digital transformation continues to accelerate in classrooms and myriad distractions vie for the attention of learners, the challenge of engaging students grows ever more daunting (Garet et al., 2020). To establish stimulating learning environments in which students associate positive emotions toward tasks, ascribe value to their…

Middle school classrooms are increasingly more diverse, and students are often disconnected and disengaged from the learning. Research has demonstrated that arts integration instructional frameworks hold promise to engage students and to improve student outcomes. The purpose of this program evaluation was to assess if implementation and use of…