The Ninth Grade Restructuring Program of the Detroit (Michigan) public schools was designed to restructure the ninth grade in ways that improve academic performance, develop positive attitudes toward learning, improve the school environment, reduce the dropout rate, and increase the graduation rate of students. Features of the program were…

Examines ways to motivate students who do not want to learn a foreign language. Questionnaires were completed by 191 year 9 pupils and 7 teachers. The responses of the teachers offered simple strategies that could be replicated without great addition to workload or financial outlay. Responses of a disgruntled minority of students are presented.…

Despite heated debate over detracking, little research exists on how the reform plays out in the classroom. This article, based on a year-long interpretive study of a detracked ninth-grade program at a diverse urban high school, focuses on the encounter between the "official" practices of the detracked classrooms under study and the…

A new test theory for performance-based assessment is proposed. Criteria for "good" performance-based items, ways of measuring cognitive complexity, methods for determining maturity levels of understanding, and scaling systems are discussed. A performance-based task completed by 51 ninth and tenth graders in June 1993 was studied.…

Increased interest in interdisciplinary instruction in secondary schools has led to the development of different models. At one school in the Shenandoah Valley (Virginia) three designs evolved when teams of teachers took on nontraditional, integrated instruction as a goal. In general, integrated curriculum designs in secondary schools match one of…

This document presents a curriculum unit in family life education for students in grades 7 through 9 that encompasses learning about human sexuality, interpersonal relationships, and roles within the family. The unit is designed to attain the following goals: (1) to help students gain a detailed knowledge of the anatomy, physiology, and uniqueness…

Using a theater arts thematic approach to demonstrate ways listening, speaking, and writing activities can be built around the study of works of literature, this guide presents activities and sample lessons to help students develop an awareness of the interrelationships between performance and the language arts. Following an introduction, the…

This research compared the performance of ninth grade females and males on flight protocol, with particular attention to interpretation of the graphs of paths of falling bodies, rolling objects, and projectiles. These subjects were chosen because they had received no formal instruction in projectile motion, yet through typical life experience, had…

This article reports on a classroom-based case study of a group of six Year 10 students, within a class of 23 students. The study implemented constructivist-informed teaching and learning approaches within a classroom setting in the topic of optics and documented any changes in the conceptual understanding students had about seven central concepts…

This study explored the importance of group interaction for learning. It investigated: (1) the relationship between group interaction and achievement, and whether this relationship was constant across ability levels; and (2) the importance of ability, extroversion-introversion, and group composition as predictors of group interaction. The sample…

This ninth-grade unit on language differences is intended to increase "the student's awareness or sensitivity to the ways in which language varies with the differing backgrounds and interests of those who use language," to develop his "abilities to adapt his language behavior to more effectively meet the demands of a variety of…

An inter-racial simulation game was administered to 6 ninth grade social studies classes in a desegregated upper middle class suburban junior high school to determine how the game would affect the white students racial attitudes and the self perceived race relations within the classrooms. There were two experimental treatments, the Sunrise game,…

The Specialized Language Activities Program (ESEA Title 3 Project) to motivate students to improve their oral language was conducted in an essentially rural section of Maine with an experimental group and a control group of 80 ninth-grade students with an I.Q. range of 85-100 and poor language usage. Sixty-seven percent of them had repeated at…

The purpose of this study was to implement a curriculum that emphasized a cultural approach rather than a physical approach to World Geography. Through the implementation of this curriculum at Kearns Junior High School (Kearns, Utah), the students developed a broader understanding of diverse cultures. The project involved 62 ninth graders, and was…

This paper reports on the classroom learning environment and teaching practices in a Papua New Guinea ninth-grade science class and the conflict between the informal, traditional learning paradigm and new school approaches to science teaching. Observations and interviews with teachers and four students were supplemented with questionnaires and…