The debate regarding the effectiveness of educating students with disabilities in inclusive settings versus traditional Special education settings to yield increased levels of achievement has been ongoing in the American education system for decades. This action research study was conducted at a sixth through eighth grade public middle school in…

The purpose of this study is to explore how can increased parental involvement be encouraged in the K-12 school in the Rio Grande Valley in order to facilitate greater student engagement and academic success. An action research project will be done to explore middle school teachers' perspectives on parental involvement and the effect it has on…

Public education has evolved throughout the years, whereas traditional school settings focused on students sitting quietly in the classroom waiting for instructions from their teachers who orchestrated the lessons and procedures for running the classroom. Although student voice always existed, it was often overlooked. For the most part, emphasis…

Teachers' understanding of the socioeconomic background may result in improved skills at addressing the barriers to the academic achievement for middle school Black male students. However, there is a lack of understanding regarding teachers' perceptions of barriers and culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) efficacy when educating Black students in…

Purpose: The purpose of this viewpoint article is to share the reflections of school and university leaders on the success of their emerging school-university partnership for the preparation of middle school teachers. Design/methodology/approach: The article is a reflective paper in which the leaders of the school-university partnership discuss…

Research studies are abundant in pointing at how the transition from additive to multiplicative thinking acts as a core challenge for students' understanding of proportionality. This said, we have yet to understand how this transition can be supported, and there remains significant questions to address about how students experience it. Recent work…

Teaching middle school students during adolescence can be challenging; moreover, students who have been impacted by trauma have additional needs and supports to succeed in school. According to the American Psychological Association (APA, 2013), two-thirds of children in the United States indicated they had experienced a traumatic event before age…

In response to the challenge of geometry's abstract and less engaging nature for students, this study explored the potential of connecting geometry to cultural elements, specifically geometric ornaments found in various cultures worldwide. Geometric ornaments, laden with cultural and spiritual significance, serve as a bridge between mathematics…

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…

We report on a teacher development program aimed at improving mathematics teaching and learning from grades 5-9. The 18-month largely online program arose from a partnership of mathematics education researchers, mathematicians, physicists, and nine school districts. The program employed functions as a lens to reinterpret and interconnect content…

This paper focuses on the discourse of teachers and instructors in a TEAMS (Teaching Exploratively for All Mathematics Students) professional development (PD) setting and on the discursive mechanisms that afford such learning. We conceptualize learning in this PD as a change in a teacher's pedagogical discourse--from alignment with Delivery…

The achievement gap, or opportunity gap, in education is when one group of students outperforms another group of students in statistical category. For decades, these gaps been analyzed in an attempt to support students and close these differences in categorical scores. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to focus on closing the…

One of the biggest problems facing American educators is the challenge to increase student achievement in the era of accountability and high stakes testing (DuFour et al., 2016). Student test scores and achievement remain stagnant across south Georgia (GADOE, 2018a; GADOE, 2019b). One reform used by schools to help increase student achievement is…

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…

Teachers set the tone for their classrooms, but what teacher beliefs shape students' sense of belonging? We investigate how teachers' mindsets--or their beliefs about learning and school--relate to adolescents' individual and collective reports of classroom belonging. Our pre-registered analyses include a multilevel design of how 1,200 US middle…