The West Virginia Department of Education (WVDE) conducted a Special Circumstance Review of Philippi Middle School at the specific direction of the State Superintendent beginning on November 9, 2023, to examine compliance with the laws and policies affecting students' safety and well-being, discipline and administrative protocols, and academic…

Differences in performance between students living in poverty and more advantaged students are reflective of an opportunity gap, as opposed to a gap in student ability. Walker-Dalhouse and Risko focus on disparities in literacy achievement that might be attributed to color-blind practices, deficit mindsets, low expectations, or context-neutral…

The teaching and learning of chemistry can be challenging due to the complex and abstract nature of the subject matter. Traditional methods of instruction often struggle to engage students and facilitate an understanding of essential chemical concepts. To address this, an innovative card game, "Compound Chain", was developed and…

A gulf exists between prior work testing metacognitive instructional interventions and teacher practices that may support metacognition in the classroom. To help bridge this gulf, we designed an observational protocol to capture whether and how teachers provide metacognitive support in their talk and examined whether these supports were related to…

Although reasoning and proof in learning and teaching mathematics is crucial and have gained more presence in school mathematics, both students and their teachers face great difficulties when engaging in proving activities. One potential cause for such difficulties might be due to teachers' conception of proof. However, to date, there are few, if…

A coherent curriculum that clearly defines sets of ideas that build upon one another to meet desired learning goals can successfully support the development of meaningful understanding across time. This study explores the influence of a coherent curriculum as a systematic approach to aligning and sequencing specific ideas to support students in…

Communicating mathematical ideas through writing, listening, and verbalizing allows students to think about how they "think" about mathematics. By focusing this communication on a reflection of how one thinks about mathematics, metacognitive writing engages students as mathematicians and learners. In this article we describe a…

Choosing a specialty school involves huge challenges for families. This research aims to understand the behavioral process that leads families to choose among various specialty school programs. Discrete choice models, based on revealed preferences data from middle school applications in a large school district in Florida, are estimated using both,…

U.S. mathematics teachers face considerable pressures to keep up with pacing guides and to prepare students for standardized tests. At the same time, they are called upon to engage students in innovative exploratory activities and to incorporate new technologies into their lessons. These competing priorities pose considerable challenges. Against…

Transition from primary (elementary) to secondary school can be both an exciting and a daunting prospect for young adolescents. Ensuring that students quickly settle into their new secondary school environment is the goal of transition programmes employed by schools. These programmes typically comprise a number of discrete and interrelated…

This study aims to investigate the obstacles in eighth-grade students' understanding of integer exponents using a mixed method research design. A total of 165 eighth-grade students were given a paper-pencil task and clinical interviews were conducted with 12 students. The findings indicated that achievement of the participants was low, especially…

Teachers' homework follow-up practices, the in-class strategies teachers use to monitor their students' homework assignments, have an impact on their students' homework behaviors and academic achievement. The current study explored the perspectives of middle school mathematics teachers on the three domains of homework follow-up: the practices used…

The aim of this research was to explore 11 to 12-year-old children's understanding of the mass of objects made from different materials, and the measurement of this attribute. In depth task-based interviews were conducted with six children attending six different schools; five were in Year 6 and one in Year 7. The children were found to hold…

The problem of practice described in this paper was identified by varying academic performances of students in a middle school located in South Carolina. The identified problem led the researcher to formulate a research question: What is the impact of inquiry-based learning on academic achievement for eighth-grade students in social studies? The…

This paper focuses on investigating whether the contents of 6th grade math lesson in the digital education platform (EBA) used in distance education in Turkey during the COVID-19 pandemic period are appropriate to the critical thinking standards. The contents of the math lesson, which are in the digital education platform (EBA) in 2020-2021…