Background: Intrapersonal and external factors, including social pressures and the desire for acceptance from peers, influence sexual activity among adolescents. This study examined how personal characteristics, risky behaviors, normative beliefs, household factors, and engagement in extracurricular activities were related to high school freshman…

Instructional coaching runs the risk of being abandoned by policy makers and secondary schools if efficacy expectations related to adolescent literacy are not met (Knight, 2010; Walpole & McKenna, 2008). Research into coaching has examined the roles of coaches (Borman & Fenger, 2006; Smith, 2007) as well as the stances employed during…

The middle-to-high-school transition and the first year of high school are critical periods in students' lives. According to the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), "The passage of students from the middle grades to high school is the most difficult transition point in education" (2002, p. 24). Although there are many…

Geometry students need challenges. They need to apply what they already know to new contexts. As a result, high school teacher Wayne Nirode is always looking for groups of related problems of theorems to challenge his geometry students. He came across one such group or problems when reading Jun's (2012) one-page abstract posted online for the…

This National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) First Look report introduces new data for two separate measures of 4-year on-time graduation rates as well as event dropout rates for school year (SY) 2010-11 and SY 2011-12. Specifically this report provides the following: (1) Four-year adjusted cohort graduation rate (ACGR) data reported by…

School success is closely linked to intelligence but also to non-cognitive factors such as achievement motivation. The present study examines which non-cognitive factors predict secondary school grades and looks at reasons why female students tend to outperform their male counterparts. A sample of 554 German freshman students provided measures of…

Background: The ways in which adolescents define and view sex, abstinence, and virginity impact the efforts of sexuality educators and sexual health professionals. This study examined terminology used by nonsexually active high school students to define abstinence and virginity and identified words students associate with these terms. Purposes…

An essential element of science instruction is content literacy. In order to improve literacy specific to science, vocabulary must be addressed. As Jitendra et al. (2004) pointed out, "because learning vocabulary during independent reading is very inefficient for students with reading difficulties, vocabulary and word learning skills must be…

This study determined whether participation in an accelerated curriculum (specifically, the International Baccalaureate [IB] program) upon entry to high school is associated with increases in stress and/or associated with psychological problems. Data from self-report questionnaires were collected at two time points (summer after eighth grade, fall…

This study has been carried out to compare the integrated science process of the students having field dependent and independent cognitive style. A total of 496 students (285 female, 211 male) participated using by stratified sampling method from seven high schools located in the Cappadocia Region of Turkey. While students' science process…

The authors propose an instructional use for Google Earth (a GIS application) as an anchoring tool for knowledge integration. Google Earth can be used to support student explorations of world geography based on Wikipedia articles on earth science and history topics. We asked 66 Taiwanese high-school freshmen to make place marks with explanatory…

Computer simulation users can freely control operational factors and simulation results, repeat processes, make changes, and learn from simulation environment feedback. The focus of this paper is on simulation-based design tools and their effects on student learning processes in a group of 101 Taiwanese senior high school students. Participants…

Many high school physics courses have deemphasized mathematics, which has changed the nature and role of the inquiry experiments in them. This article lays out an approach built upon an introductory unit, "Patterns in Nature," which aims to engage students in constructing their understanding of physics through contextualizing and…

Across the country, high schools have found that their ninth-grade students have the highest rates of truancy, discipline referrals, failures, and retentions. A school's worst data points are usually found among freshmen. For this reason, proactive schools seek strategies for transitioning freshmen into high school. An effective freshman…

This qualitative within-site case study ("N" = 10) is a follow-up study to a 2006-2007 investigation that analyzed how 1 high school created a community of care for its ninth-grade students through the implementation of a ninth-grade transition program--Freshman Focus. All participants were interviewed again 3 years later during…