Current education policy and reform advocate for increasing the level of challenge in K-12 classrooms in order to maximize students' learning and academic success. This study examined middle school teachers' views about implementing challenging instruction while participating in a whole-school professional development initiative. A…

The purpose of this study was to better understand how students with learning disabilities, including those who struggle specifically with mathematics, engage with fraction computation. In particular, we examined error patterns, the influence of like and unlike denominators on these patterns, and correct solution methods. Although skill-related…

A descriptive, holistic, multiple-case methodology was applied to examine the nature of participation in discourse of two low- and two high-achieving grade 6 students while solving mathematical tasks in a standards-based classroom. Data collected via classroom observations and student interviews were analyzed through a multiple-cycle coding…

Much has been written recently about the role of talk in content-area learning, including science learning. However, there is still much to be learned about how teachers begin to engage students in the kinds of peer-to-peer conversations that help them make sense of their investigations in science and that advance their conceptual understandings.…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) establish a challenging text-complexity standard for all high school graduates to read at college and workplace text-complexity levels. We argue that implementation of the CCSS standard requires concurrent examination of historical student reading-growth trends. An example of a historical student average…

This study examined potential links among parents' role beliefs for involvement and social-contextual variables contributing to its development. A sample of parents from two Title I middle schools responded to surveys assessing their perceptions of student and teacher invitations to involvement, school expectations of involvement, school…

Despite the current theoretical momentum for the importance of academic English and the acknowledgment that academic materials increase in complexity through the grades, little empirical attention has been devoted to the role of academic English in academic achievement. This study examined the amount of variance in academic achievement explained…

One dimension of language proficiency considered important for reading and writing academic texts is morphological awareness--the understanding of how complex words are formed from meaningful smaller units (i.e., affixes, roots) that contribute to words' meanings and functions. This quasi-experimental study evaluated the effects of instruction on…

Assessments of instructional quality based on classroom observations and artifacts have the potential to measure and improve mathematics instruction and learning. This article describes the Instructional Quality Assessment (IQA) Mathematics Toolkit and examines its ability to identify the nature and quality of classroom instruction. The IQA…

Using artifacts of teachers' practices, classroom observations, and interviews, we explore how 2 novice history teachers use writing in their middle school classrooms. Both teachers focused on evidence-based, interpretive writing in their preservice work, an approach promoted by their methods courses. After graduation, one teacher continued this…

International comparisons have highlighted that the U.S. mathematics curriculum, both in terms of curriculum influences (e.g., textbooks, standards) and actual instruction, is broad and shallow. Standards-based reform is explicitly designed to improve coherence and reduce redundancy across grades. This article evaluates the redundancy of…

Using survey data from novice teachers at the elementary and middle school level across 11 districts, multilevel logistic regressions were estimated to examine the association between novices' perceptions of the administrative climate and their desire to remain teaching within their schools. We find that the probability that a novice teacher…

Two experimental studies at one urban middle school investigated the effects of the combination of Tier I and Tier II evidence-based reading instruction compared to Tier I alone on struggling sixth-grade readers (N = 109). All participants received free or reduced-price lunch, and 95% were considered English learners at some point in their school…

Tendency to blame the victim of bullying in 9- and 12-year-old Italian students (N = 246, 124 boys and 122 girls) was examined by manipulating gender of the victim and type of bullying (direct [physical] vs. indirect [relational]). Children were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 scenarios describing a bullying episode and rated on 5 questions about how…

In this study we investigated the relation of rigorous instructional practices and teachers' efforts to create a respectful, collaborative learning environment to students' positive behavior toward one another and to the rate and quality of students' participation in classroom discussions. Full class period (i.e., 50-minute) observations of…