A driving force in standards-based educational reform was the 1983 release of "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform" (National Commission of Excellence in Education [NCEE], 1983). The report called for "an end to the minimum competency testing movement and the beginning of a high-stakes testing movement that would raise the…

Despite the ongoing, extensive focus on the more equitable representation of gifted students from diverse populations, poor and minority students remain underserved by gifted education proportional to their representation in the broader student population (Donovan & Cross, 2002; U.S. Department of Education, 1993). One possible factor contributing…

This study was an investigation of staff development programs designed to provide teachers with strategies through which all learners, including gifted, minority, and limited-English proficient students, can be appropriately served in a middle school environment sensitive to diverse learner academic needs. Participants in the study were assigned…

In response to the numerous school reform initiatives being implemented, Sternberg proposed a theory of contextual modifiability stating that successful change in a school requires that the school be modifiable. Sternberg developed the School Characteristics Inventory (SCI), a 116-item Likert scale questionnaire, to assess schools'…

Middle school teachers' reported classroom practices, middle school students' perceptions of classroom practice, and the alignment of reported practices and perceptions with the middle school movement's orientation towards student achievement form the foci of this study. As part of a larger study looking at two different interventions for…