In 2006, the authors began a project to understand what happens in middle school technology education classrooms in order to document the goals that technology education teachers pursue, the instructional strategies they use to teach children to meet these outcomes, the measures they use to assess achievement of these goals, and the learning actions that they believe students must engage to master their goals. As part of this project, they identified and reviewed articles appearing in four technology education journals from 1995-2006--"Journal of Technology Education," "Journal of Technology Studies," "Journal of Industrial Teacher Education," and the "International Journal of Technology and Design Education"--that addressed middle school age teaching and students' thinking/learning. In this article, they present their review of articles appearing in these four journals that addressed middle school children's thinking. The review is divided into four sections: The first section summarizes investigations of middle school children's problem solving/design, the second summarizes reports on gender issues, the third addresses laboratory/teaching context, and the final section reviews other issues raised in these journals relating to middle school children's thinking.