The present study examined age-group differences in students' self-reports of metacognitive activity in physical education settings. Five hundred and ten students of public elementary, junior and senior high school provided self-reports concerning the metacognitive processes they use during physical education lessons, their goal orientations and…

This study described and compared the reading of sixth and eighth grade students both in and out of school using a unique data set collected with the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). On average, students read forty minutes a day out of class and seventeen minutes a day in class indicating that reading is a common leisure practice for…

The goal of the study was to examine whether social motives (social mimicry, mutual attraction, and unreciprocated attraction) predict changes in antisocial behavior across middle school grades. The 2,003 initial participants (55% girls) were drawn from a larger longitudinal study of urban public school students: 44% Latino, 26% African-American,…

School administrators in a small suburban school district in Southeastern Pennsylvania were concerned about grade inflation at the elementary and secondary levels. Specifically, they wanted to know if students in grades 5, 8, and 11 who scored at the basic or below basic performance level on the 2003-2004 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment…

Educational assessment is a process of collecting evidence and interpreting it to provide instructors with information regarding students' learning. However, the current design and scoring of most standardized educational tests are insufficient to serve this purpose. The limitation exists primarily due to the lack of cognitive information…

The Nation's Report Card [TM] informs the public about the academic achievement of elementary and secondary students in the United States. Report cards communicate the findings of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a continuing and nationally representative measure of achievement in various subjects over time. It compares…

This article is an outline of what the author did in his classroom to incorporate the help of two volunteer engineers to create a powerful learning unit and cumulative review for his eighth-grade physical science students. This unit reviews what students have learned during the school year regarding force, motion, Newton's laws, gas laws, and…

The No Child Left Behind Act requires the states to test their students every year to determine how many of them have achieved proficiency in, among other areas, math, science, and reading. The law also requires that the states participate yearly in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which calls itself "the Nation's…

Should all students study algebra in eighth grade? Would offering early access to algebra to all students help close the achievement gap among minority populations? Traditional educational policies that provide eighth grade algebra to selected students raise questions about equitable access to advanced opportunities for all students. Even when…

The central focus of social studies education is to help develop effective citizens in a democratic society, and one of the components of effective citizenship is the development of critical thinking skills (Mallen 2005; National Council for the Social Studies 1991; Parker 1999). One aspect of critical thinking is the ability to look at…

This article reports on a study exploring the respective contributions of first language (L1) listening comprehension ability and second language (L2) proficiency to L2 listening comprehension ability. The participants were 75 Grade 8 English-speaking students learning French. The students completed tests in French and in English that required…

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it examines the requirement in No Child Left Behind (NCLB) that states have all students "proficient" in math and reading by 2013-2014. Second, the article assesses the organizational capacity of eighth-grade programs in Massachusetts to meet that directive. Issues of organizational…

The design of technology tools has the potential to dramatically influence how students interact with tools, and these interactions, in turn, may influence students' mathematical problem solving. To better understand these interactions, we analyzed eighth grade students' problem solving as they used a java applet designed to specifically accompany…

This study surveyed 166 students when they were in Grade 8 of high school and then again when they were in Grade 10, using measures of career indecision and career decision-making self-efficacy. Consistent with social-cognitive theories, the authors hypothesized that changes in self-efficacy over time would be causally associated with changes in…

Using Freudenthal's method of historical phenomenology, the history of statistics was investigated as a source of inspiration for instructional design. Based on systematically selected historical examples, hypotheses were formulated about how students could be supported in learning to reason with particular statistical concepts and graphs. Such a…