One middle school's implementation of corrective reading was evaluated for student reading outcomes and treatment fidelity. Findings indicated that sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students made progress in decoding and oral reading fluency over the school year; however, students did not demonstrate greater gains during the semester enrolled in…

In this qualitative study, the authors examine the advisory program of a Horizon Schools to Watch middle grades school. Horizon Schools to Watch is the Illinois affiliate of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle School Reform national Schools to Watch (STW) program, meaning schools with the STW designation have made significant inroads in…

Through this exploratory study, I developed conjectures about classroom conditions that had the potential to support (or not) the development of productive dispositions toward mathematics. To do so, I listened to sixth-grade students' voices about their experiences with small-group work in 2 mathematics classrooms and contrasted their teachers'…

This study investigates 1 middle level student of mixed heritage and his siblings as they assimilated and achieved within a small urban community. The main case focuses on 1 adolescent's experiences both in and out of schools. How this middle grade student identified and was treated had vast effects on his educational performance, adding insights…

This article examines what can happen when teachers and students work to create a critical dialogic space, taking up issues of race, culture, and privilege in classroom discussions. The study focuses on middle school students of culturally and economically diverse backgrounds as well as their 2 White teachers. In English and social studies…

This article presents findings drawn from the development of an intervention designed to leverage Spanish to improve English reading comprehension. Five teachers and 18 middle school English language learners (ELLs) in 2 urban middle schools participated in the project over the course of an academic year. Analysis of policy documents, interviews,…

This qualitative case study analyzed how one interdisciplinary team within a large middle school fostered a responsive adolescent-centered community for eighth-grade team students. Data were collected during the spring semester of the 2009 school year via observations, individual interviews, and focus group interviews with nine participants,…

The development and implementation of a comprehensive and systemic career development program, The Career Institute, provided the mechanism through which one school community addressed students' career development and college readiness needs while also attending to their academic and personal-social development. The Career Institute consisted of a…

Given the dearth of research on elementary education majors' experiences in middle level endorsement programs (Anderson, 2009), and the shortage of teachers aspiring to work with young adolescents, this case study examined the topic to provide insight into the experiences of preservice elementary education teachers. Specifically, this study…

This research examined the important factors influencing the mathematics achievement of students in middle schools by hierarchically specifying the personal and contextual variables. The study focused on the effect of school climate at the class level and the effects of student gender, attitude toward mathematics, educational aspiration, parent…

The purpose of the present study is to test the validity of scores on the Homework Purpose Scale (HPS) for middle school students. The participants were 1,181 eighth graders in the southeastern United States, including (a) 699 students in urban school districts and (b) 482 students in rural school districts. First, confirmatory factor analysis was…

Middle school students perform well academically when their schooling environment meets their developmental needs (Eccles et al., 1993). Both school culture and student-teacher relationships are influential aspects of the school environment that impact academic expectations, school satisfaction, and academic performance. In the current study, we…

Curriculum integration is defined as students choosing topics to study based on their questions. Several middle schools throughout the United States offer students the opportunity to develop the curriculum during the year based on their questions about themselves and about the world. The author provides the rationale, the developmental reasons…

Although curriculum integration has a long history of myriad models, rarely have those stakeholders most connected to the practice--the students--been consulted about the efficacy of the approach. This study applied a longitudinal, intrinsic case study approach (Stake, 2000) to examine middle school students' perceptions of learning and engagement…

The author reports on the formation of a performing arts-focused curriculum integration project, in which key components of curriculum integration were employed within a project-focus involving the performing arts of music, theater, and dance. The project occurred within a curricular community partnership between a public school and nearby…